A solid bounce day in the market today. Is it a turnaround? Too soon to tell - we’ll need to see a few more days like this. Volume was good - lighter than Friday’s selloff, but heavier than the typical up-days have been lately. The major indices also didn’t make headline-grabbing gains, but the action was more positive than the index figures suggest, and this on a day when crude oil prices spiked higher by almost $2.00.
The Dow moved higher by 56 points (+0.6%) to 10127, the S&P 500 gained 7 points (+0.6%) to 1153 and the Nasdaq put together a decent performance, for a change, adding 19 points (+1.0%) to 1932. The Russell 2000 bounced back with a 10 point gain (+1.6%) to 595, the Dow Transports gained 1.3%, the Dow Utilities added 1.4% and bonds rallied yet again, as the government PPI figures (and Fed members’ public comments) continue to downplay the inflation scenario, pushing the yield on the 10-year all the way down to 4.19%. Incredible.
Market internals were healthy, with advances/declines nearly 3 to 1 on the NYSE and 7 to 3 on the Nasdaq, and up/down volume 3 to 1 on the NYSE and nearly 4 to 1 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows are still suffering from the big drops, at 18/65 on the NYSE and 26/114 on the Nasdaq.
No real big losers on the day, while the biggest gains were seen in networking stocks (+4.5%), steel (+3.5%), gold & silver stocks (+3.1%), HMOs (+2.6%), oil services (+2.3%), natural gas (+2.2%), transports (+2.1%), oil stocks (+1.8%), semiconductors (+1.7%), disk drives (+1.7%), commodities (+1.7%), and chemicals (+1.7%).
Crude oil prices jumped $1.92 to $52.29, the dollar index fell another 0.3% and gold prices moved to above $433/ounce.
Earnings due out after the bell from Intel and Yahoo.