Wednesday brought a down day to the broader markets leaving a modest loss on higher volume. Last week Wednesday was a down day and also a distribution like today. Distribution days have been few and far between, because down days are a rarity lately. The TRIN closed at .88 near the highs on the day so that doesn’t show a big elephant of pressure sitting on the market. The VIX closed at 16.62 still sucking the wind out of our volatility. Gold rallied $17.00 to close at $1153 and oil down 96 cents to $85.88 a barrel.
The Nas Composite traded a down inside day, while the NDX, SPX and Dow all traded down outside days. This isn’t significant in a single day, but a follow through day would put a retracement in play for the broader markets. Today’s action did crawl up and did the late day belly flop, no pullback in this market has had follow through since mid February for a few days and then January was a more significant pullback. The buyers won’t let go of this easily and the hunt for 2K on the NDX, 1200 on SPX and 11,000 on the Dow dreams won’t go away easily.
Brokers, hardware and semi’s were the strong sectors and certainly a force on the day. Brokers have 122.28 key resistance nearing, hardware broke the triangle it has been forming since January 20th on Monday. Now key resistance is 309.15 just overhead on the HWI. Sox closed the day with divergence and still struggling at Mondays high. Things are still wobbly up here and we know that but don’t trade as a top picker. We’ll trade what we see into Thursday and be optimistic that the action will start to move both direction and continue to build on volume. Wednesday’s volume on the NYSE and Nasdaq was the best in the last 12 trading days. Futures had the best in the past four days. With early data and the most notable release of the week we should see some nice volatility early on.
Economic data for the week (underlined means more likely to be a mkt mover): Thursday 8:30 Unemployment Claims, 10:30 Natural Gas Storage. Friday 10:00 Wholesale Inventories
Some earnings for the week (keep in mind companies can change last minute: Thursday pre market ISCA, PIR and after the bell SMSC, NCTY. Friday pre market BTH, STZ and nothing after the bell.
ES (S&P 500 e-mini) Thursday’s pivot 1179.50, weekly pivot 1162.25. Intraday support: 1177, 1172.25, 1168.50, 1163.25, 1156.50. Resistance: 1178, 1182.50, 1185, 1188, 1191.75, 1195.50, 1200-1200.25, 1203, 1209
