The markets had a very nasty session, starting out with a gap down, and then moving lower in stair-step fashion all day, accelerating into the close and closing at the lows for the day going away.
Net on the day the Dow was down 733, and now is more than 1200 points off its high just yesterday morning. The S&P 500, about 137 points off the high from yesterday, was down 90.37, and the Nasdaq 100 closed down 120 points to 1244, 227 points off yesterday morning's high, or more than 15% just since early yesterday! The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) was down 23, about 10% in one day.
Technicals looked climatic as advance-declines were 28 to 3 negative on New York and 25 to 4 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was 1.6 billion to the downside and 36 million to the upside on New York. Nasdaq had 2 1/2 billion to the downside and 70 million to the upside, a complete rout.
TheTechTrader.com board was extremely negative, with multiple point losses across the board, starting with EWZ, the Brazilian ETF, which got bombed for 8.54, closing at 34.97 on 29 million. Apple (AAPL) dropped 6.13 to 97.95, Agrium (AGU) dropped 6 points to 34.27, Energy Conversion Devices (ENER) dropped 7.37 to 37.78, Mosaic (MOS) gave back 5.37 to 33.88, Sequenom (SQNM) dropped 3.04 to 16.81, Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX) down 2.82 to 24.78, Morgan Stanley (MS) down 3.54 to 18.13, Excel Maritime (EXM) got hammered down 3.62 to10.88, DryShips (DRYS) down 3.91 to 20.35, Canadian Solar (CSIQ) down 2.21 to 10.37, Citigroup (C) down 2.60 to 16.02, and Alpha Natural Resources (ANR) down 7.40 to 31.01.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say today looked even worse than the drop we had last week. So far the lows have not been taken out, although they're not too far off on the Nasdaq 100.
On the plus side, the QIDs soared by nearly 12 points to 79.32, and the SDS was up nearly 16 to 103.64. The DUG snapped back with a vengeance, up 15.42 to 62.97.
Other than that United (UAUA) was up 22 cents, and EBS up 29 cents. Those were the only stocks up, albeit small fractions. Airlines were firm for most of the day on the sharp drop in oil, which closed under $75 a barrel and is now down about 50% from its highs just in the last couple months.
Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, the indices had two consecutive very nasty down-days off yesterday's spike high and have now given back a huge chunk of their big rally. There was lots of negative fundamental news today that pressed the indices lower, and they closed at the session lows going away, about as nasty a close as you can get. We'll have to see what the implications of the last couple sessions are in terms of the overall trend, but yesterday's promising pullback consolidation violated support early on, and have extremely damaged the potential basing pattern.
So we'll have to see what shakes out the next couple sessions in order to determine if we're going much lower or not. But right now it does not look good.
