Abet Chichi2

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Boxer: Long in the Tooth, acDec22

LONG IN THE TOOTH
By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader
http://www.technicaltrader.com


The indices ended higher on Monday ,but they had four different periods of movement during the session. They started out with a strong rally that took the S&P to nominal new 52-week highs as well as the Dow, then they sold off sharply pulling back to important support that did hold on both indices, slightly taking out the earlier lows on the Nasdaq 100 but holding on the S&P and Dow.

Then after lunch the market rallied back to resistance, pulled back, retested and then took off in the last hour, closing strongly going away at the highs for the day on the Dow and S&P 500.

The Dow was up 60, the S&P 500 up 4 ¼, the Nasdaq 100 up just 5 ½, and the Composite up less than 5, with the Sox Index up just over a point.

The technical were different on both exchanges, with New York much better. Advance-declines were 20 to 12 positive on New York, but only 16 to 15 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was 2 to 1 positive on New York with a little over 1.2 billion traded. But Nasdaq was less than 7 to 5 positive, with about 1.25 billion traded there.

My personal board was very mixed today. There were some decent large cap gainers. EBAY was up 1.32 and Qualcomm (QCOM) 1.22.

On the downside, OVTI and Amgen (AMGN) were off less than a point today.

In the low-priced sector, the outstanding stocks were Encore Medical (ENMC) up half a point, and Nanogen (NGEN) up 75 cents.

Most stocks that were down on my board were down just fractionally, except for China Yuchai (CYD), off 85 cents today.

Stepping back and reviewing the patterns, the key to today’s action was that the market was resilient enough to hold the levels of support for the last 2-3 days, but Nasdaq was not able to break out and confirm the nominal new S&P and Dow highs. We’ll see if the market can continue this, but we’re getting long in the tooth and I’m still expecting a pullback sometime in the next few days.

Good trading!

Harry