Bear Mountain Bull

It’s time again for a little BMB R&R, especially with the market behaving as bizarrely as it’s been. Maybe if we stop watching it start to behave a little better…

Posting will be very light and variable over the course of this week, but we’ll put up an open thread each market day for our readers to comment on the day’s market activity or to post any interesting links they might run across.

Check the space below for whatever the latest might be during this ‘off’ time, and please visit the various sites in the ‘Links’ and ‘Regular Stops’ for up-to-date market news and analysis.

BMB will be back in full swing by next weekend.

The markets wandered around most of the day, and the major indices finished with slight gains on average volume. The Dow Industrials gained only 4 points to 10553, the S&P 500 gained 2 points (+0.2%) to 1204, and the Nasdaq moved higher by 10 points (+0.5%) to 2098. The Russell 2000 added a point-and-a-half (+0.2%) to 625, the Dow Transports were higher by 0.4%, the Utilities were unchanged and bonds held pretty steady, holding the 10-year yield at 3.90%.

Market internals were quite positive despite the lack of index movement. Advances/declines were 19/13 on the NYSE and 10 to 9 on the Nasdaq, with up/down volume 9/7 on the NYSE and 5 to 3 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows on the NYSE were 185/19, and 93/41 on the Nasdaq.

The biggest moves in the industry groups were by the airlines (+5.9%) and disk drives (+3.2%, thanks to a move of more than +16% by StorageTek on the Sun acquisition news). Also making gains were semiconductors (+1.8%), retailers (+1.1%) and networkers (+1.0%). Computer hardware stocks dropped 1.0%.

Crude oil fell nearly a dollar, finishing the day’s trading at $53.63/barrel. The dollar index fell 0.3% to 87.85, and gold moved up to near $422/ounce.

News seen on CNBC: Sun is buying Storage Tek for $4.1B.

Somehow, I don’t think that will have much of an effect on the tech landscape.