It would have been a rather tedious trading session just because of the light volume and random action, but what made it worse was that we continued to be at the mercy of the genius politicians, who still couldn't come up with a solution to the debt ceiling issue.
The weak open did give us a decent trade opportunity, as the dip-buyers did a nice job of slowly working the market back up. But then we had to listen to the newest brilliant solution out of Washington and the market ended up closing weakly. Breadth was poor all day and finished close to 4-to-1 negative with precious metals being the only group that did much. Big-cap Nasdaq names also outperformed, but the action was not very energetic.
Unfortunately, we probably will have to contend with another week of this political nonsense. Our politicians are simply incapable of doing anything in a reasonable manner until they are forced to -- and what they really want to do is defer decisions as long as possible.
At this point, we are pretty much handcuffed by the headlines.
