Thursday, September 23, 2010

Today We Got The Expected Selling

We breached the 1,130 level of the S&P 500. That was the big breakout level on Monday, but now we'll start hearing some chatter about a failed breakout.

The next major level of technical support is the 200-day simple moving average around 1,116. Many will be very concerned if that falls; it may kill the uptrend we've been in since the end of August.

To a great degree, the market has been held up by a few big-cap names lately such as AAPL and AMZN on the Nasdaq and WMT and CAT on the DJIA. When those names softened this afternoon, we went down in a hurry.

This is the third negative day in a row for the major indices, which means we are starting to test the boundary between a healthy correction and a rollover. I'm still not too worried here, but if another bounce attempt is sold and we take out today's lows, then it will really start to look like we have a change in market character hitting.

One of the other things I don't like is that the news flow is starting to take on a negative edge. The weekly claims numbers and housing starts numbers were roughly in line, but a couple weeks ago, when sentiment was quite poor, we were jumping much more vigorously on just OK economic news.

long AAPL

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