USMarketView

April 3, 2008

At the final bell, stocks were almost unchanged. While the indices managed to close fractionally higher, their gains were substantially below the median for the trading pattern of the past four days.

The recent past of the market can be characterized as plus one/minus one/plus two – that is, up today(that’s plus one), down yesterday (minus one), and closing higher on the previous two dates (plus two).

In comparing today’s S&P500 advance of .13 percent, with the 80 such previous incidents of this pattern since January 2000, we find that its increase is less than a third of the historical .72 percent median.

Moreover in the past, on the day following this pattern, the S&P500 increased on 32 occasions and declined 48 times.

The comparison for the NASDAQ is similar: today’s change of .08 percent is much smaller than the median gain of .98 percent. As for the next day, there were 40 advances and just 30 declines, in the 70 times that this pattern was displayed by the NASDAQ.

The DJIA gained .74 percent today, compared to the median .79 percent, but declines outnumbered advances for the next trading day, 44 minus days to the 38 positive closes on the next day.

DJIA .14 percent
NASDAQ .08 percent
S&P500 .13 percent

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 12 042008000000Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:22:29 +0000 and is filed under Market Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.