An oversold market reacts
Green everywhere
to be seen.
With bargain-hunters out in force,
stocks capped a blowout year on an upnote Friday, ending the millennium with a
lot of plus signs.
Thanks to the bottom-fishers, who
trolled mainly in the small-cap sector, New York Stock Exchange breadth was 7 to
3, miles better than a Dow up 44 points. On the Nasdaq, the a-d line read 13 to
8.
The Nasdaq closed the year up 85.6%, its
best showing ever, confounding everyone on the Street…Of note: Roughly
one-half of all Nasdaq issues actually gave ground in ’99 — it certainly paid to be a trader in ’99. It was interesting how critics of trading grew increasingly silent as the year wore on.
Within Friday’s list, the cybers continued to
be a case of the haves and have-nots…Among the better-known Nets, AOL
[AOL>AOL], Amazon [AMZN>AMZN], RealNetworks [RNWK>RNWK], and eBay
[EBAY>EBAY] remained disappointments, while Yahoo! [YHOO>YHOO], DoubleClick
[DCLK>DCLK], and CMGI [CMGI>CMGI] continued to show promise.
Among a limp color=#008000>benchmark tech set, mild relative strength was seen in
the telecoms. Here, Nokia [NOK>NOK] and Qualcomm [QCOM>QCOM] paved the
trail. The latter skyrocketed about 2400% this year…otherwise, most tech
heavies were mixed with a negative bias.
The semis
showed some of the best tone…the chips have been basing for the
past seven days after running up about 20% in the prior week.
See you next millennium.
Â