Bulls Must 'Punch Through' S&P 1150 to 1154 Level: Cashin

Art Cashin

For Tuesday's stock rally to have any credibility, the bulls have to "punch through" the 1150 to 1154 level of the Standard & Poor's 500 , Art Cashin told CNBC Tuesday.

"We’re at a pretty important area right now in the S&P," said the director of floor operations for UBS Financial Services. "We reached some serious extremes (Monday). The breadth of the market was worse than it was back in the 1987 crash. I've been here for both of them so I can tell you it was worse. I think that's part of the reason why we're getting a rebound today."

He said about 50 percent of the buying is "bargain hunting and a little bit of short covering," he said. The Nasdaq, which had been the weakest of the indices Monday, is the strongest Tuesday, as investors buy back at least some of what they sold.

People "tend to go back to old favorites, but not too rapidly. There are wounds out there that are healing not too rapidly," Cashin said.

Confidence in a sustained market rally is also shaky.

"I don’t think confidence will be rebuilt so rapidly," Cashin said. "Confidence is going to be something that takes a while to build."

He said the biggest concern on the trading floor is what the Federal Reserve will say after its meeting. Traders don't believe there will be another round of quantitative easing, said Cashin, who paraphrased Albert Einstein by saying that insanity is doing same thing over and over and expecting a different result.