Bear Mountain Bull

Yawn.

Stocks bounced around for most of the day on light volume ahead of a three-day weekend, then took a dive in the closing minutes to push the indices down near their lows of the day.

All of the indices finished red:

The bond market took the afternoon off ahead of the long weekend, but not before giving long yields a boost upward:
6-month: 0.45%    2-yr: 0.96%    5-yr: 1.87%    10-yr: 2.89%    30-yr: 3.67%.

Internals were a little worse than the indices might indicate, but volume was light. Advances/declines were 2 to 3 on the NYSE and 9 to 10 on the Nasdaq, with up/down volume 3 to 7 on the NYSE and 5 to 7 on the Nasdaq. New highs/lows were 4/46 on the NYSE and 9/94 on the Nasdaq.

The groups finished mixed, leaning to the losing side. Financials led the losers: REITs (-6.0%), banks (-5.3%), paper (-4.6%), retail (-2.1%), computer hardware (-1.8%), chemicals (-1.6%), gold/silver stocks (-1.5%), brokers (-1.5%) transportation (-1.5%). On the green side of the page were the defense stocks (+2.8%), hospitals (+1.3%), telecom (+1.2%), semiconductors (+1.2%) and metals and mining (+1.1%).

Energy prices were mixed again. Crude finally put in an up day, climbing more than 3 bucks to $37.51/barrel, but gasoline gave up a nickel to $1.21/gallon and natural gas fell again to $4.45/mmBTU. The dollar index fell back to 85.98. The precious metals were also mixed, with gold falling five bucks to $942/ounce but silver higher by 17 cents to $13.67/ounce.

BMB Note:   Not much to discuss today. But despite repeated efforts by our government to bolster things, the financials remain weak — and I doubt the market, as a whole, can get anything meaningful going to the upside without them.

Looking forward to next week, anything could happen, with (no doubt) more government giveaways to be announced in a shortened trading week (markets closed on Monday), topped off with options expiration on Friday. Hard to keep the wheel straight in those crosswinds.