The small and mid cap stocks continued to underperform the big caps today. While the S&P and Dow barely moved the Nasdaq and Russell each were down almost 1%. The Russell fell back into bear territory today by breaking its 200-day moving average and the Nasdaq is about one bad day away from breaking its 200-day. Things could get real interesting as we head into earnings season...
Here are charts of the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Russell 2000:
Trend Table
I've switched the short-term trends on the Nasdaq and Russell to "down" since they're under their 10-day moving averages.
| Trend | Nasdaq | S&P 500 | Russell 2000 |
| Primary | Lat | Up | Lat |
| Intermediate | Up | Up | Up |
| Short-term | Up | Down(-) | Down(-) |
(+) Indicates an upward reclassification today
(-) Indicates a downward reclassification today
Lat Indicates a Lateral trend
Well, I have to disagree with your analysis about the long term prospect based on a flat 200 day MA as flat as a pancake. Just because the 200 DMA is flat doesn't imply that the market will be flat in the long term. If you go back to 07 Oct 2004 and look at the nasdaq chart back then, you had a similar situation where the 200 DMA was as flat as a pancake after a big drop and a rebound and yet, in the next two months, there was a huge rally. Of course, just because the two situations look very similar doesn't imply history will repeat itself. I'm sure you can also find other similar situations where the 200 DMA was flat and the market moved sideways in the long term, but it's not a certainty. If anyone knows exactly how this will play out, let me in.
YT, nice rant but show me where I said the market WILL BE flat b/c of the 200-day moving average. I said the long term trend IS flat, meaning that is HAS BEEN flat.
Mike, I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this to you. But even in firefox, if your webpage doesn't have enough space (width) to fit in, it gives precedence to the advertisements, as opposed to blog content. This causes the graphics in the blog content like charts on only partially display. Just want to bring it to your attention.
Thanks for the blog.
Srini,
No, I hadn't heard of that issue from anybody before. I've viewed my site on a few different versions of Firefox on PCs and Macs, as well as IE and I've never seen that. Can you tell me what version of FireFox you're using and what your screen resolution is? I think the site displays fine for all resoltions above 800 x 600.
Michael,
Please, don't take this as a rant. I'm just observing how your analysis came across to the reader even if that's not what you meant (at least for some readers I should say). Your obervation about the 200 DMA and the long trend was immediately correlated with the $compq movement and maybe, that's not what you meant. It's healthy to discuss about things and provide clarifications where needed. Then my question is " Is it safe to correlate the 200 DMA with the long term if it doesn't reflect what the market will be doing in the next few months ?"
Mike, I've Firefox 1.5.0.7 with 1024 x 768 resolution. This only happens if I've my bookmarks displayed as the sidebar in the browser. Thanks.
Ah, that explains it! That's just the default behaviour of the website template that I'm using. I'll try to see if I can find a way to override the way the display works but since I'm a dunce when it comes to web page formatting it's probably gonna keep working the way it does now. In the mean time, if it's really driving you carzy you can view the entire post in the RSS feed either though a feed reader or just by clicking on the little orange square over in the subscribe section in the right column.