More of the same - and this is gettting really old. Another negative, light volume day, and stocks just keep dribbling lower. This market is killing me - just move, please, one way or the other, and get it over with!! I can’t stand this slow motion slide…
The market never got out of the blocks today, in either direction, and the major indices all finished with slight losses. The Dow Industrials slipped 13 points (-0.1%) to 104449, the S&P 500 was unchanged at 1181 and the Nasdaq dropped 7 points (-0.4%) to 1992. The Russell 2000 lost 4 points (-0.6%) to 607, the Dow Transports recovered only 0.4% from its Friday losses, the Dow Utilities were up by 1.2% and bonds rallied, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield down to 4.44%.
Market internals were again decidedly negative, with advances/declines coming in at 7/9 on the NYSE and 11/19 on the Nasdaq. Up/down volume ran about 2/3 on both exhanges, and new highs/lows were 49/74 on the NYSE and 25/99 on the Nasdaq.
Very little to write home about in the industry groups, with utilities moving up by 1.1%, oil stocks by 0.9% and oil services by 0.9%. On the down side, disk drives fell 1.0% and semiconductors dropped 0.8%.
Crude oil prices continued to fall early in the day, but rallied later to gain 39 cents to $53.71/barrel. The dollar index dropped 0.4%, and gold prices moved a little higher to $428/ounce.
Earnings reports will start trickling out this week, and those may finally get spark some interest in stocks - be it buying or selling.
