The Iran election results triggered the typical late-day spike a bit too early, and the bulls didn't have the ammo today to hold us up with the weekend lurking. It ended up being another mild day for the S&P 500, which was almost exactly flat for the week, (there's a ferocious battle going on between 920 and 950) but there was some interesting action under the surface.
Oil and commodity stocks pulled back today, but they were the big winners this week. But more interesting to me were the continued pockets of very hot speculative action in some small-cap groups like biotechnology and China-related stocks.
Although the indices didn't make a lot of headway, there was a solid bid under the market. The bears were unable to gain any downside traction at all, and the buyers stayed ready to pounce on the most shallow of pullbacks. On the other hand, the bulls were equally inept at hanging on to gains and squandered a breakout move on Thursday when the S&P 500 moved over 950.
The end result is that we are right back smack in the middle of the same trading range we were in a week ago. There were some troublesome rollovers in big-cap momentum stocks today, and the small-cap momentum narrowed quite a bit, but technically the market still has not done anything wrong.
It concerns me that some of the leading stocks are losing traction, but for the most part there haven't been any major technical breakdowns. It still looks more like consolidation within an uptrend rather than something more dire, but we have to stay very watchful for the day when the dip-buyers finally run out of gas.
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