By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader
We had a volatile session, but it ended well with the indices not far off the highs for the day. In fact, the S&P 500 closed very near the highs for the day and it ended positively in what appeared to be late pre-weekend short-covering that affected the market in a positive note, and closed strongly particularly in the last 20-30 minutes.
The day started out with a gap up, then pulled back quickly and retested successfully, and then had a very strong surge that took the Nasdaq 100 up near yesterday's early morning reaction high and tested resistance on the S&P 500 near 930. They then backed off and took back about 50% of the rally, retested and move back up again but couldn't breakout, and then backed and filled for a couple hours in a narrow range, and on about 5-6 occasions tried to break out. With a little more than an hour to go they actually did break out of that trading range, but were not able to break through the morning highs, then had a very sharp sell off going into the last half hour. That sharp sell-off nearly retested the entire trading range and the early morning lows, but quickly turned around with about 20-30 minutes to go and exploded to the upside, spiking to the upside particularly in the last 5 minutes.
Net on the day the Dow was up 248, the S&P 500 up nearly 26, and the Nasdaq 100 more than 29 1/2. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) was up just 3.75 today.
The advance-declines were positive by 21 to 9 on New York and by about 17 to 10 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was about 4 1/2 to 1 positive on New York on total volume of just short of 1 1/4 billion. Nasdaq traded 1.85 billion and had about a 7 to 2 positive volume ratio.
So a good day for the technicals and the indices.
TheTechTrader.com board was mostly positive, but some of the stocks were very narrowly mixed. Leading the way today were the agriculture stocks, with CF Industries (CF) up 5.62 at 60.84, POT up 1.58 at 80.57, Mosaic (MOS) up 2.61 to 36.49, and AGU up 1.43 to 37.81.
Other stocks of note, portfolio position Emergent BioSolutions (EBS) exploded to a new all-time high, closing at 20.35, up 3.41 on a strong earnings report and upgrades. Energy Conversion Devices (ENER)jumped to 38.09, up 3.49, and NVDA, a new portfolio position, closed at 8.72, up 1.10 on 28 million.
Sequenom (SQNM) advanced 45 cents to 17.82, and portfolio position Converted Organics (COIN) jumped to 7.20, setting a new multi-week high, before backing off to 6.89, still up 62 cents. On the downside, the short instruments had a very negative day, of course, with the SDS down 5.05 and the QID down 3.59. DryShips (DRYS) had a very difficult day in the shipping group, down 1.51 to 13.79. Excel Maritime (EXM) at 10.57 was off 57 cents, so the shippers definitely trailed the market.
Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, as indicated earlier the indices ran up in the morning, backed and filled mid-day, tried to break out and couldn't, rolled over hard but held the lows, and then came on strong to close positively on the day, We'll see if today's action, along with yesterday's late action, is more of a consolidation range before additional downside or a basing period for a move up. They have an opportunity if they can move from here and break out to create a head and shoulders bottom on several of the indices, but that remains to be seen.
Good trading!
Harry
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