Courtesy of Doug Short.
The S&P 500 spent the day zigzagging in a fairly narrow range around yesterday’s closing price. This morning’s lackluster durable goods data had little effect on the trade. The index opened fractionally higher but sold off to its morning low shortly after 10 AM. It then rallied by degrees to its 0.25% intraday high, slightly above the 1700 level, just before lunch, and then sold off to its -0.33% intraday low in the early afternoon. A slow rally from the low failed in the final hour. The index closed the day down 0.27%. That’s the fifth day of declines and the first 5-day plunge since December of last year.
The Senate shenanigans, including the 21-hour “Green Eggs and Ham” filibuster, appear to have the market in a straightjacket. The prospect of a crippling shutdown and default is too far-fetched to trigger major selling, but the travesty under the dome is hardly the inspiration for new market highs.
I referred to today’s trading range as narrow. The 0.58% intraday range was at the 22nd percentile of the 185 market days in 2013.
Here’s a 15-minute snapshot of the week so far.
The yield on the 10-year note continues to slide, with today’s offical closing yield at 2.63%. Here’s the equivalent snapshot of the TNX index.
Trading volume today was 2% above its 50-day moving average. As we can see, there’s been no surge in volume for the 5-day selloff. That spike on Friday was a fairly standard thumbprint of options expirations for a quadruple witching Friday.
The S&P 500 is now up 18.69% for 2013 and 1.90% below the all-time closing high of August 18.
For a better sense of how these declines figure into a larger historical context, here’s a long-term view of secular bull and bear markets in the S&P Composite since 1871.
