Daily Market Commentary

The selling continued on Friday turning a modestly positive week for the S&P 500, into a negative one. The Dow lost another nearly 500-points just as investors are anticipating the annual Santa Claus rally. We saw a few breakdowns in the charts and some critical levels being tested in others. Will the Santa Claus rally materialize in the coming week or two, or will investors be finding coal in their portfolios this Christmas?

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If you looked at the close of the major indices yesterday you would be confused as to what type of day we had on Thursday. The Dow gained a respectable 70-points, the S&P was flat, and the Nasdaq was down moderately. Fine. Overall that's pretty mellow and flat. The problem is, the small caps and Transportation Index got pounded, and the number of stocks that were down far outweighed the number that were up on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.

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Trade war on, trade war off. The switch continues to be flipped and stocks are getting tossed around like a rag doll. The Dow was up as high as +458-points on the day but closed up "just" 157, so it lost 300-points in the final hours of trading. This back and forth has been a recent standoff between the bulls and bears and unless the bears can capitalize soon, the bulls will get the added boost from the holiday seasonality and could win this battle. Also, a key level held on the S&P ...

After spending most of the night in negative territory, investors woke up to a big ...

Stocks were flat to mixed on Monday but it was a positive day as we saw a big reversal day after the Dow ...