Today was one of those days in which a big move in the indices wasn't reflected in the level of excitement among market players. Part of that is due to much of the gain being produced by some big-caps, including IBM, KO and MSFT, but another part of it was that much of the afternoon strength was due to scrambling to reposition when President Obama made comments that there has been some progress on a deal regarding the debt ceiling. There is much skepticism about how easily a deal will be put together but the potential for a substantial relief rally is just too great to fight it.
I suspect market players are not particularly well positioned for upside at this point, which helped to contribute to the strong spike up this afternoon. We saw similar straight-up action a couple weeks ago, when market players were caught by surprise and that ended up going much further than many anticipated.
Earnings reports rolled in and VMW and ISRG are doing very well but CMG, FTNT, YHOO and RVBD are under pressure, at least so far. AAPL's report was stellar.
Never a dull moment.
