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…

News & EPS will dominate week

Index & Sector performance 10/20/14 The Market: This is a very light Economic data week but don’t worry.  Earnings will more than make up for it with a Packed schedule all the way through to Friday. All the indices on the WSC Scoreboard were nicely higher but the Dow (DIA) was the clear laggard after IBM (IBM) lost over 7% due to a disappointing Q3 report which missed on revenues and EPS.  The company also announced that they would no longer be able to meet its goal of $20/share in operating EPS by 2015. Solid results across all the sectors…

Market follows up gap with more gains

Index & Sector performance 9/17/13 The Market: The majority of today’s action was in the first half hour of trading when the S&P gaped slightly higher and then ran up seeing the majority of the days gains.  The remainder of the day the market was able to hold those gains and drift higher on what looked to be an overall light volume day. In economic news, Core CPI came in as expected while headline CPI  was actually less than expected with a 0.1% increase when 0.2% was expected.  Remember headline reflects food and energy while core strips it out.  Tomorrow…

S&P regains the 50

The Market: Today did not have anything to really speak of in terms of Economic data and the remainder of the week is not necessarily uneventful but also not one of the more data laden weeks we see.  Tuesday morning brings the NFIB Small Business Index, Thursday the Unemployment Claims as well as Fed Budget Balance and Import prices. and Friday rounds out the week with Consumer Sentiment and Inflation Expectations as well as Retail Sales and PPI.  We track the data and the numbers posted in the Events Calendar. Story Stocks: Shareholders of Delta Air Lines (DAL) have had…

Week in Review

DJIA -40.86 (-0.28%) to 14,565.25; S&P 500 -6.70 (-0.43%) to 1,553.28; NASDAQ -21.12 (-0.65%) to 3,203.86 The March unemployment data came in well below expectations (88K vs 198K expectations) which send the market gaping lower and down over 1% in early trading.  This took the S&P 500 toward the 50 day SMA and into a range of support which is used to rally off the lows ultimately only closing down slightly for the day. Big loser on the day was F5 Networks (FFIV) which lose over 19% after announcing Q2 earnings that were below analyst expectations.  The company blamed the lower results on decreasing telecom and…

Daily Wrap

DJIA -111.66 (-0.76%) to 14,550.35; S&P 500 -16.56 (-1.05%) to 1,553.69; NASDAQ -36.26 (-1.11%) to 3,218.60 Today in the pre-market we were essentially flat/slight higher and even after a poor ADP number the S&P 500 was able to open slightly higher but that was short lived and the rest of the day we saw market declines which at the lows approached down 20 points in the S&P 500 or over 1%.  Along with the weak ADP and general concerns on slower global growth we also had two other event weighing on the markets.  First the U.S. Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, stated that the…