Despite exceptionally strong earnings from AAPL Tuesday night, the market was unable to build on that momentum today. In fact, Apple did nothing after its initial gap up, and a number of other stocks performed poorly following their reports.
Overall, breadth was slightly negative, but a bounce in financials, notably from GS, helped contain the damage.
The most notable characteristic of today's action was that it was very slow and there wasn't any excitement over earnings. Many stocks drifted around and there was some ugly action in technology names like FTNT, RVBD, APKT and FFIV.
F5 has reported and it's under pressure as it confirmed what Riverbed said yesterday about Europe being slow. QCOM is also down on an OK report.
The big test is INTC results, I suppose. They reported a good quarter and guidance, but the stock traded down after hours. It seems like it is always trading with a "PC discount" attached to it. As expected, INTC lowered PC growth forecasts. Other business segments are showing excellent growth, but traders at the moment are not caring about that.
We are very likely to see some news out of Europe overnight, so there may be plenty of potential landmines to navigate.
