Stock Market Commentary for Thursday, June 16, 2005

People continued to struggle mightily on Wednesday over unclear expectations for the short-term market trend.  There was a little optimism on the open due to some decent economic data, but "sell into any rally" sentiment took over and sent the market back down.  Some disappointment over the weekly oil inventory report took some people by surprise (unnecessarily) and led to a mini-sell-off, which took Nasdaq down almost 16 points by around 12:30 p.m., but the market recovered nicely for the rest of the afternoon.

Nasdaq rose a modest 5.88 points, but closed 22 points above its intra-day low.  The bad news is that Nasdaq closed modestly below its opening level, which is normally a moderate yellow flag, but since the open was only up eight points, it's not too big a deal.  Given the mid-day sell-off, I'd say this was the big opportunity for technical speculators to break the back of the market, but the market was a bit too resilient for them.

The economic data was fairly decent, but people are still anxious about the price of crude oil.

Nasdaq trading volume was light, not quite moderate (1.73 billion shares), and breadth was moderately positive, with 1.30 gainers for each loser.

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-- Jack Krupansky