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September 29, 2005

Interesting mood shift today, Thurs., Sept. 29, 2005, 5:42 PM

Maybe the planets and stars were perfectly aligned today. Whatever it was, there was a significant shift in trader sentiment. Early today there was a heavy weighting of decliners over advancers, and then things changed, and closed the opposite way. Unfortunately I was pre-occupied by other matters all day and could not follow the market closely or report to you my perspective on these events.

One thing I did notice earlier in the afternoon, and was going to point out then (but now is just as good), is that the market is nervous. Sudden and sharp moves of 60-70 points in the Dow 30 index seem to come out of the blue. Momentum traders seem to be pushing the market both ways.

Also the end of day results showed 3.3 to 1 advancers to decliners of all the options tradable stocks and 4.6 to 1 for the S&P Small Cap stocks. That is impressive. Again, I don't have a sense of what happened in trading today, but will look into it tonight.

I did note that as the last 60 Dow points were being added, late in the day, the TSX (heavily oil weighted Toronto index) was simultaneously losing 60 points. That happened after the oil market closed. So the move this afternoon could be something as simple as traders believing that oil prices are going to come down tomorrow so that the economy can get back into forward gear.

Posted by Posted by Bill Cara on September 29, 2005 05:43:15 PM | Category: Cara Today in the Market