Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
An interesting session despite the mixed and “quiet” tape. The S&P 500 regained that 1404 level that was a weekly high from 2008, and sits over the 1405 10 day moving average. But most of the leaders of the past few months were non participants today. Can’t remember how few times the NASDAQ was lagging the DJIA this quarter.
The last day of the quarter was fitting on how things have gone for most of the past 2 months – big caps led, small caps lagged: +0.37% SP 500 v -0.23% Russell 2000 – a 0.6% variance among the two, something we saw over and over throughout February and March.
On the positive side it was nice to see stocks as a group have the ability to stay upright without a certain group of the same 10-20 stocks leading. We’ll see if this is day 1 of a rotation into laggard groups of Q1, or a warning shot. Energy stocks continue to act strange – despite high oil they don’t act well. I suppose that is a reflection of China/Europe slowdown, but usually they move more in line with crude (at least those not tied to the death spiral in nat gas) China has their PMI data out Sunday night and we saw from the flash report it won’t be good – so let’s see how the market reacts to that Monday morning.
Broadly speaking the major indexes continues to bounce off every test of the 20 day moving average (only 1 instance of that not happening all quarter, and it ended up being a headfake for eager bears); at some point that will change and so will viewpoints.
Disclosure Notice
Any securities mentioned on this page are not held by the author in his personal portfolio. Securities mentioned may or may not be held by the author in the mutual fund he manages, the Paladin Long Short Fund (PALFX). For a list of the aforementioned fund’s holdings at the end of the prior quarter, visit the Paladin Funds website at http://www.paladinfunds.com/holdings/blog
