Techs and Nets Turn Things Around

The Dow and S&P 500 have had the same pattern the last two days: rally from around 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to the day’s high, then sell off to the day’s low until around 3:00 p.m., and finally, rally moderately into the close.

The techs and internets made a good showing yesterday, with the NASDAQ 100 finishing up 41 points. The NDX SPDRS (QQQ) closed up for the third consecutive day and also made a nine-day high close on a congestion breakout–a positive, since the techs have sold off over the past two to three weeks.

The S&P and the Dow both finished up yesterday, despite the long bond falling 20 ticks (to yield 5.84) after being up about 5 ticks at 9:00 a.m. (the five-year T-note auction was not a roaring success). Breadth was good, and volume picked up on the up side, which has been a little light lately. The Russell 2000 continues to act very well. It followed through nicely yesterday after breaking out of a 10-day consolidation on Monday.

Early on, the Street seems to like Cisco’s (CSCO) earnings–it’s up 4 1/2. That could get the techs, and the rest of the tape, moving today.

Target Stocks Of The Day  Continuation patterns that look promising include Circuit City [CC>CC], Texas Instruments [TXN>TXN], Dollar General [DG>DG], Level One Communications [LEVL>LEVL], Tellabs [TLAB>TLAB], LSI Logic [LSI>LSI] and Sun Microsystems [SUNW>SUNW].

A narrow-range pattern setup (take in the direction of the trend only) is Franklin Resources [BEN>BEN].

Program trading numbers  Buy: 7.60. Sell: 2.96. Fair Value: 5.20.

Editor’s note: If you want to learn more about Kevin Haggerty’s trading strategies, click on the link below to go to his new series of tutorial articles.