Ah, a good day. Beautiful weather, a nice day for driving, lunch with some friends…um, no, that was my day, not the market’s.
But it doesn’t look as though the market’s day was all that bad either. After starting off strong and falling back midday, the major indices rallied a bit into the close to finish with slight gains. The Dow finished higher by 46 points (+0.4%) at 10837, the S&P 500 added 4 points (+0.3%) to 1210 and the Nasdaq gained 6 points (+0.3%) to 2089. The broader market didn’t match the gains of the majors, however, as the Russell 2000 finished unchanged at 635. The bond market dipped slightly, bringing the 10-year Treasury yield up to 4.10%.
Market internals were biased to the positive again, with volume about average. The Nasdaq threw a bit of a wrench into the works with its advance/decline figure of 15 to 16, whereas the NYSE came in at nearly 6 to 5. Up/down volume looked better, running nearly 3 to 2 on both exchanges. New highs outnumbered new lows by 420 to 45.
A look at the industry groups finds computer hardware (+1.9%), disk drives (+1.7%), and chemicals (+0.9%) leading the way, while the losers weren’t hit too badly - gold & silver stocks took the biggest loss with a 0.5% drop.
Crude oil hangs around $47.30/barrel, the US dollar index fell again by 0.4%, and gold prices moved to near $425/ounce.