Stock Market Commentary for Thursday, May 12, 2005

Overall market movement on Wednesday was simply a technical adjustment, possibly a classic "dead-cat bounce", after the moderately sharp decline on Tuesday. In fact, we had a steep intra-day decline of 19 points (bottoming shortly after noon) before we had a fairly strong recovery into the close. Nasdaq had a moderate 8.78-point gain, but that was a 29-point rise off the intra-day low.

A terrorism scare added to volatility, but caused no real harm to the market. If anything, it may have helped to set a near-term bottom to the correction off the recent high.

All of the economic data was rather decent.

Nasdaq trading volume was barely moderate (1.77 billion shares), and breadth was very modestly negative, with 1.04 losers for each gainer. Negative breadth on a gain suggests that larger-cap stocks rallied while smaller-cap stocks were weaker.

Click here to read the entire column.

-- Jack Krupansky