Holiday drift higher continues

Index & Sector performance 12/26/13

The Market:

Gap and go as the S&P opened higher and never retraced climbing higher the remainder of the day.  While again on light volume that is not to be unexpected due to the holiday season and shortened trading week.

In economic news Unemployment claims came in better than expected posting a 338K when 346K was expected and the previous week came in at 379K.  Also worth noting that previous week’s 379K was revised ever so slightly upward to 380K.  Tomorrow’s session is light with no major economic news and only Natural Gas and Crude Oil inventories.

In the News:

Amazon.com (AMZN) reported record numbers for Amazon Prime and that the company shipped over 36 million items order on Cyber Monday.  Also helping was ChannelAdvisor which estimates same-store-sales of AMZN increased over 25% during the holiday season.

Also seeing gains in same-store-sales according to ChannelAdvisor was Ebay (EBAY) but the stock lost about 2% n the day as Wall Street must have been looking for better numbers than the 9.6% reported.

FedEx (FDX) and UPS (UPS) were both negatively mentioned in the news as some shipments scheduled to show up before the holiday were delayed and will not be delivered until after.  While both stocks managed to close higher, this prompted Walls Fargo to comment on how this could cause some brand damage in the short term although they maintained their Market Perform rating on both companies.

Moving lower on the day included Textura (TXTR) which closed down 16.8% after being mentioned negatively by Citron Research (Link to full story) and Goodrich Petroleum (GDP) which had issues with a well in Mississippi.  GDP has an interesting set-up where it could be carving a trade-able bottom with positive divergence on both the MACD and RSI.  Today’s low is a key level to us which is not only a short term double bottom but also represents a previous level of reaction.  See the chart for details.

GDP Daily

The Game Plan:

As we have noted and discussed before, when the market has a strong trend going into a holiday or light trading period it tends to continue to drift in that direction.  It will be interesting to see what Friday and next week has in store as we are faced with yet another shortened trading week with a Wednesday holiday.  Can the drift continue?  Above $1815 in the S&P and it is hard to argue otherwise but Friday might end up a down day or at least a down morning.