FITTING ENDING
By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader (www.thetechtrader.com)
thetechtrader.com
Closing Technical Market Comments
Tue Dec 31st 2002
It was a fitting ending to a difficult year, this being another difficult day. At the end of the day the Dow and S&P 500 managed to edge into positive territory while the Nasdaq 100 and the SOX were slightly negative. But it was pretty close to even and unchanged today.
At the same time the technicals were surprisingly strong by comparison. At the close the Dow was up a little less than 9, the S&P 500 was up less than half a point, the Nasdaq Composite and 100 were down between 4 and 5 points each, and the SOX index was down less than 2/3 of a point, so you can see a narrowly changed day.
A review of the technicals showed advance-declines were solidly ahead by 20 to 11 on New York and by about 2000 to 1400 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was 3 to 2 positive on New York with a little less than 1.3 billion traded. On Nasdaq it was slightly positive by 5 to 4 with 1.5 billion traded.
The technicals were positively diverging today on a down day on Nasdaq, which often occurs before we start to get a move. That may be a precursor that the market may rebound next week.
I expected some year-end window dressing, portfolio adjustments but didn’t see much of that except for some of the low-priced stocks.
The mixed session was reflected in the majority of the stocks on my board, with the only point-plus movers being IBM, up 1.25, and Microsoft, down 1.05. Everything was very fractionally changed today.
Reviewing the index chart patterns, the indices reached the bottom of their recent down-channels today and bounced off of that, but could not get back up through yesterday afternoon’s resistance highs on the S&P 500, twice challenging that. The Nasdaq made lower highs all day today, but still held above the morning lows and above yesterday’s lows. So we’ll see if this is a basing attempt or if it turns out to be just a consolidation before we go still lower.
In any case, that’s it for 2002. Have a happy new year, and be careful out there!
Harry
Thanks for updating the BPNDX for us Gottfried. Also thank you for the link concerning oil supplies.
I wish everyone here the happiest and most prosperous New Year ever!
I was just looking through my charts and found INTC at its lowest RSI in 6 months. Could be time for a bounce in INTC. Soon at least if we get a penetration of the lower Bollinger Band to go with the oversold condition:
stockcharts.com[h,a]daclyyay[pb50,200!d20,2!c20!c10][vc60][iub14!uk14!la12,26,9]
RtS |
