Well, the market behaved as though nothing happened yesterday, with the Nasdaq gaining back all of its losses and then some. The Dow recovered 60 points of yesterday’s fall, up 0.6% to 11054. The S&P 500 was up 11 points (+0.8%) to 1291, and the Nasdaq was the star of the day, adding 33 points (+1.5%) to 2315. The Russell 2000 hit another new closing high, gaining 12 points (+1.6%) to 742. The Dow Transports also regained new-high status, up 1.8% while the Utilities were down 0.3%. Bonds were mostly lower, pushing yields up. We find 6-month rates at 4.74%, 2-year at 4.70%, 5-year at 4.63%, 10-year at 4.59% and the 30-year at 4.56%.
Market internals almost completely reversed from yesterday: advances/declines were 11 to 5 on each exchange, with up/down volume 3 to 1 on the NYSE and 4 to 1 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows were 171/26 on the NYSE and 180/37 on the Nasdaq.
The group picture was reversed as well, with nearly every group gaining ground. Semiconductors led the way, zooming up 4.3%, followed by networking stocks (+3.9%), steel stocks (+3.1%), disk drives (+2.9%), oil services (+2.0%), computer technology (+1.9%), internets (+1.8%), oil stocks (+1.8%), transports (+1.8%), natural resources (+1.7%), software (+1.6%), precious metals stocks (+1.6%), computer hardware (+1.5%), telecom (+1.4%) and airlines (+1.4%).
Energy prices were somewhat higher, with crude oil inching up to $61.97/barrel. The big move was in gasoline, up to $1.62/gallon, while natural gas was pretty much unchanged at $6.73/mmBTU. The dollar recovered to 90.24 after a lousy day yesterday, and the price of gold held fairly firm at $563/ounce.
BMB Note: I’m sorry. I can’t make heads or tails out of this mess. How in the world can you get a handle on things when you’ve got the Nasdaq down 26 points one day and up 33 points the next? That’s nuts.
Tech stocks and metals were zooming today. Why? I have no idea. The problem with this market is that there’s very little consistency. There’s a lot of thrashing around from day to day, as investors run from one group to another, and very few groups seem to making much headway. There are some good individual stocks, and some bad ones. You have to be lucky enough to be in the few good names to make any money. That’s the bottom line, at least for now. You just can’t make broad bets in one direction or another, and that makes for tough sledding. But since you have contrasting days back-to-back, it does expose some things. You can look for stocks that were strong during yesterday’s lousy action, and stay away from stocks that did poorly when things were going well today.