Bear Mountain Bull

Stocks picked up where they left off in the final hour of trading on Friday, and moved higher in a broad-based advance, bouncing off the new lows put in just Friday morning.

All of the indices moved higher, with the Utilities lagging:

In Treasuries, yields were higher across the board – except that 3-month is still dragging right around zero:
6-month: 0.45%    2-yr: 1.21%    5-yr: 2.21%    10-yr: 3.34%    30-yr: 3.78%.

Internals were strongly positive, with volume just a bit below Friday’s levels. Advances/declines were 8 to 1 on the NYSE and 3 to 1 on the Nasdaq, with up/down volume better than 18 to 1 on each exchange. But there are still no new highs to speak of, and even on a ‘big’ day, we still saw almost 400 new lows. New highs/lows were 1/125 on the NYSE and 3/255 on the Nasdaq.

All of the groups were green, many of them double digits, with the financials leading the bounce: brokers (+19.3%), REITs (+18.1%), banks (+17.7%), homebuilders (+12.8%), metals and mining (+12.4%), telecom (+11.2%), steel (+10.8%), retail (+10.6%) and airlines (+10.5%).

Energy prices continue to recover from last week’s slide. Crude oil ramped up to $54.50/barrel, gasoline rose to $1.14/gallon, and natural gas jumped to $6.94/mmBTU. The dollar index fell to 85.90, and the precious metals moved higher for a second day, with gold up to $822/ounce and silver to $10.50/ounce.

BMB Note:   A fairly decent day for the market – the problem is that it comes just a day off fresh lows at the end of last week, so doesn’t do much to repair the damage done up to this point. We’ll see if this bounce up can develop into something more – and maybe it can as we move into the holiday period. But right now, it’s just a bounce like so many we’ve seen before.

Let’s just be patient and keep our fingers crossed that things might start to stabilize a bit.