Closing Technical Market Comments for Mon Sep 10, 2007
Resistance Repels Rally Efforts
By Harry Boxer, The Technical Trader (www.thetechtrader.com)
It was a rather volatile day but the indices ended not far from the flat line. With the pre-market futures strongly higher, the market gapped up strongly ,but that was about it. They sold off immediately and sharply for the rest of the morning until about 11 o'clock, when they started a 4 hour rally that stair-stepped its way up, eventually reaching not far from the highs for the session. The early highs were almost equaled on the SPX. They fell a little short on the NDX. Over the last 30-40 minutes they rolled over and gave back a Big chunk of the gains.
The Dow still managed to gain 14.47, but the S&P 500 was down 1.85. The Nasdaq 100 was up just 1.85 and more than 20 points off the high. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) was up 2.91.
Advance-declines told the story today, with the underlying technicals negative by 5 to 3 on New York and about 2 to 1 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was better than 2 to 1 on New York and 10 to 7 negative on Nasdaq. Total volume was a little short of 1 1/3 billion on New York and 1 3/4 billion on Nasdaq.
TheTechTrader.com board was very mixed today. There were several point-plus gainers, mostly in the solar energy group where LDK was up 2.72, SPWR 2.25, and JASO 1.27.
VASCO Data Security (VDSI), highlighted in Investors Business Daily, jumped 1.80. But the star of the day by far today was VMWare (VMW), which opened strong ,then backed off during the morning decline ,but then rallied $10 to get back over 79 before some profit-taking knocked it back a bit, but still up 7.26 on 6 2/3 million shares today.
Those were the only point-plus losers on our board. Other gainers of note, GigaMedia (GIGM) gained 56 cents. Auxilium Pharmaceuticals (AUXL), one of our portfolio positions, was up 35 cents. Sigma Designs (SIGM) was up 42 cents, and Dendreon (DNDN) surged on heavy volume today, gaining 43 cents.
On the downside, point-plus losers included shipping stocks, DryShips (DRYS) down 2, and Excel Maritime (EXM) down 1.24. FuelTek (FTEK) lost 1.17, Global Solutions (GSOL) 1.02, and low-priced Cardica (CRDC) 1.52 today, a big percentage loss after last week's big gains. Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH) fell 92 cents, Chindex (CHDX) 77 cents and VII 61 cents.
Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, today's action was volatile but appeared to be corrective, particularly on the rally, as overhead resistance failed to be broken and declining tops lines held as well, particularly on the S&P 500.
So we'll see what the next couple days bring. We're still looking for more downside potentially.
Good trading!
Harry
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