March 19, 2024

XLU stands out in today’s action

Index & Sector performance 2/18/15 The Market: A choppy session overall which ended up finishing flat.  Some negative divergence is building on the S&P 500 60 minute chart but, even when it leads to a pullback, the divergence can exist for many day.  We wouldn’t be surprised to see the index continue to meander and drift higher for the remainder of the week into Options expiration. In individual sectors it was the Utilities (XLU) leading the way and by a wide margin finishing up 2.37%.  We would be watching the XLU closely here to see if it can build on…

Revisiting December’s lows

Index & Sector performance 1/6/15 The Market: Oil appears to still be affecting the broad market and causing caution in investors as crude, which lost the psychological $50 level yesterday, traded down over $2 in today’s session. Yesterday we remarked that a gap down in the morning could be a short term trading opportunity to the long side but unfortunately we opened flat to slightly up, negative the set-up, and then continue to crawl higher in the first hour of trading before the indices began to sharply lose ground.  Today’s sharp drop eventually found support at the mid-December trading lows…

S&P on 5 day win streak

Index & Sector performance 4/21/14   The Market: The S&P 500 has been on an impressive  5 day winning streak but much like the “V” bottom we say back in February this year, this rally is coming on lower than average volume with today being by far the lowest in the S&P 500 sector ETF “SPY”. We stated in our 4/14 write-up that we would not be surprised to see the market used short term oversold levels and the shortened holiday Op-Ex week to rally.  The question now is as traders get back to the desk in both the U.S….

Stong gains for shortened Op-Ex week

Index & Sector performance 4/16/14 The Market: From our recap Monday we noted that while the market still appeared vulnerable to the downside, we would also not be surprised to see oversold short term levels and the shortened holiday trading week provide a bounce.  We did not at that time realize that we would get both the downside and the rally all in one day but that is in fact what happened on Tuesday and today was a follow-through on that action. Tomorrow is the last day of trading for the week since the market is closed Friday in observance…

Daily Wrap

DJIA -81.45 (-0.56%) to 14,537.14; S&P 500 -10.40 (-0.67%) to 1,541.61; NASDAQ -40.03 (-1.44%) to 2,741.95 Today was another strong down day but had more back and forth than previous sessions.  Stocks started the day slightly positive following up on an Unemployment claims number that wasn’t necessarily bullish but also and maybe more importantly wasn’t bearish and came in relatively inline with estimates.  Those early gains gave way and at the lows the S&P 500 cash index was down roughly 16 points.  Overall the action was not like previous sessions and it did feel as though the market is trying to set-up for…