Daily Market Commentary

After a surprising small loss on the trading day before Christmas, the market followed up with an equally surprising loss on the day after. Like Friday, the loss was minimal but historically that is a rare feat. The Dow lost 8-points, the S&P 500 was down 0.11% while the Nasdaq took a more meaningful hit with a 0.34% loss. Small caps and the I-fund were the outliers picking up a small gains, and bonds rallied. ...

Stocks were uncharacteristically down, but basically flat, the day before Christmas weekend, a day that has an historically positive bias. The Dow lost 28-points and while the indices were down 3 of the last 4 days, it was a positive week for stocks last week. ...

Stocks rallied on Thursday as the bears seem to have taken their normal early holiday break and let the bulls have their way. There was some late selling to take the indices off their highs, but there was a lot of green in the indices and small caps, which love the tax bill, led on the upside. The Dow added another 56-points with the S&P adding a similar percentage.
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Stocks were up early on Wednesday but dipped after the tax bill was passed by the House of Representatives and will be signed into law. The Dow lost just 28-points but that was 130-points off the earlier highs. The small caps held onto some gains as they benefit the most from the tax bill, and the Transports had a big day after FedEx posted strong earnings.
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Stocks pulled back a bit on Tuesday with the Dow slipping 37-points but we saw more moderate losses in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. Small caps and the I-fund also took hits but as we look at the charts we'll see that they just did a little cleaning up by filling Monday's open gaps. Now comes the test. ...