By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader (www.thetechtrader.com) Today the market finished down and was down all session. The morning was very ugly, but the market did stabilize around lunch hour and for the rest of the day pretty much bounced back and forth in a sideways consolidation/basing attempt.
Net on the day the Dow was down 91, the S&P 14 ½, Nasdaq Composite 27, the Nasdaq 100 19. The SOX Index was down 7 3/4, a little more than 2 percent.
The losses were indeed confirmed by the technicals today. We had a 3-to-1 negative plurality of advance-declines on New York today, about 2 to 1 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume on New York was almost 4 to 1 negative. On Nasdaq it was about 3 to 1 negative, with more than a billion to the downside and about 360 million to the upside. Total volume was about 1.2 billion on New York and 1.45 billion on Nasdaq.
A review of my personal board showed a vast majority of losers. Tech stocks did not have a good day today. There were a couple of exceptions on the upside today. Low-priced MetaLink (MTLK) showed remarkable relative strength today and was up 35 cents . Evolving Systems (EVOL) also strong,up 48 cents. Standout FindWhat.com (FWHT)was up 1.14.
Amgen (AMGN) down 1.69, IBM (IBM) 1.22, Veritas (VRTS) 76 cents, and Microsoft (MSFT) 85 cents were among the leading losers.
Stepping back and reviewing the patterns, we’re now in the sixth day of declines off the top near the 1318 level on the Nasdaq 100, and today reached as low as 1232. So we’ve dropped 86 points in six days. The S&P 500 has dropped from its double-top from around the 12th of July near the 1015-16 zone and reached down today as low as the 975 support area, a drop of 40 points.
So we’re showing a 6 day short-term decline/ pullback off the highs, and this could be a key area to see whether the market is able to rebound or the decline accelerates and tests much deeper support.
Major support now lies beneath on the Nasdaq 100 at around the 1180-85 zone, and on the S&P 500 at around the 963-65 zone. I expect on a short-term basis that they will hold. We’ll soon see if we get a rally first or not.
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