First Look at the Charts for 2010

I was planning on posting a ton of charts today but after looking through my scans there's just not a lot worth posting. A look at some key indices gives one a good idea of what most stocks look like right now. We had a light volume rally to end December which took the indices to new highs for the year. The key will be whether or not the market can hold on to those (ill-gotten) gains once normal volume levels return. We've also got earnings coming up soon so we should get a good idea of how all those "green shoots" are doing here in the dead of winter. Hopefully some nice setups will start to appear in the next week or so once things start to shake out.

The S&P already looks like a failed push to new highs. Bulls need to defend the 1110 level to keep it from slipping back into that two month long trading range. Perhaps it will get saved by new year money flow though.

The Nasdaq has a much better looking move to new highs working. It should have a much easier time of staying in breakout territory than many of the other indices. But if broad market weakness develops it could be ripe for profit taking.

The small caps took two months longer than the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to take out its October high. It accomplished that feat in late December on light volume. That push to new highs is the most suspect of the major averages in my mind.

The financials have been stalled since August and I really don't see the broader market doing much without them participating. The downward sloping 50-day moving average is a little troubling but I think the chart is OK as long as it stays above the bottom of triangle drawn on the chart below.

Here's a look at Apple (AAPL), which moved to new highs on anticipation of an earth-changing product (tablet PC?) announcement later this month. I know a lot of bears want to jump on this but it will probably be a tough short ahead of that announcement.

A couple of downgrades...