HISTORICAL!
By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader (www.thetechtrader.com)
It was a huge day, very exciting to watch. I would call this close to a historical day and perhaps a major bottom, but we’ll see what the market holds over the next few days and whether there’s a critical follow-through or not. But it certainly was one of the biggest surges I’ve ever seen.
I told my diary subscribers before the open in a note at 9:10 am Eastern: “Lady's & gentleman, today may very well be an historical day! NO market has ever continued this type of decline at the rate it's going without AT LEAST a very sharp snap back rally. I STRONGLY believe today is an opportunity that only comes around once every few YEARS.”
We sure got that opportunity. The Dow got down to important long-term support around 7500, hitting 7532 and then surged in the morning, got up to a point where the market met some resistance, and it then backed and filled for a few hours consolidating very bullishly without breaking support on all the indices. Then in the last hour and a half the indices spiked upward, appearing to be fueled by heavy buying and short covering at the end of the day.
The indices closed at or very near their highs for the day. The Dow was up 489 points, at one point getting above 8200 and closing at 8191. A monster day! The S&P 500 ran from 775 to 844, closing just a point off the high, up 45 points on the day, another huge move there.
The Nasdaq Composite surged nearly 100 points off its low from 1192 to 1290, closing right there, up 61, and the Nasdaq 100 moved from 869 to 951, closing within pennies of its high, up 54 ½.
The SOX index was weak most of the day and was really holding the Nasdaq 100 back. But in the last hour or so it too surged by nearly 20 points to close up 14 on the day.
Advance-declines on both indices and the technicals were strong and were way off the earlier numbers, as would be expected. The NYSE stats were nearly 2000 up, 1340 down, a 3-2 positive advantage. Nasdaq was similar, ahead by 20-14. But up/down volume was the real story today. NYSE advancing volume was almost 2.25 billion shares, declining volume only 0.5 billion. Total volume close to 2.8 billion, I believe an all-time record and possibly the most amount of up volume ever traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Nasdaq was strong, as well, with 1.8 billion up and only 362 million down, and about 2.2 billion traded there, so a stellar day there as well.
One of the early keys today was that the market gapped down after the McClellan Oscillator was already at a -318 reading, so at that point the oscillator was near historic lows. The VIX surged this morning up to nearly 57 on the NYSE, an extremely high reading, and the VXN was near 70. Those big fear readings along with the very oversold condition in the morning caused a complete turnaround inA newsletter for opt-in email subscribers to Harry's Closing Technical Market Comments. Removal instructions at bottom.
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