Paul Shread

We’ve had an unusual — and potentially bullish — development in the market the last two days. After yesterday’s 90% downside volume day on the NYSE — the second in a week — we had a 90% upside volume day today on both the Nasdaq and NYSE. Such extremes in close proximity suggest that investors […]

Stocks soared Tuesday in a global rally, as investors snapped up shares that had been beaten down in a week of intense selling. The rally started in Asia, where selling began a week ago in the Chinese markets, and spread to Europe and the U.S., where stocks had their best day since July. About 80% […]

We had our second 90% downside day in a week on the NYSE today, and put-call ratios are through the roof. That is a lot of panic selling, particularly given today’s relatively small decline. Can a bounce be that far off? The Dow (first chart below) has important support at 12,000-12,020, and first resistance is […]

AMD said on Monday that it won’t meet Wall Street sales estimates this quarter, giving investors yet another reason to unload tech stocks. The Nasdaq, already reeling from a 6% loss last week, shed another 1.2%, as U.S. stocks followed overseas markets lower on renewed fears of Japanese “carry trade” liquidation and the implosion of […]

Note: The Technical Analysis column will return on Monday. The Nasdaq (first two charts below) seems likely to give a sell signal tomorrow, for a nasty one-week loss of 4% or so, although monthly inflows could support the market into the middle of next week. About the only way to avoid the carnage was to […]

Dell shares slipped in late trading Thursday after the company’s sales came in well below Wall Street expectations. Because of ongoing accounting issues, Dell only released preliminary results for its fiscal fourth quarter, following a warning in late January. Dell’s earnings of 30 cents a share were a penny ahead of estimates, but a 5% […]

Sun Microsystems is shifting engineering support for its 6920 midrange storage virtualization array to HDS, deepening the storage ties between the two. As part of the agreement, HDS will support Sun StorageTek 6920 customers for five years, said Sun spokesperson Michelle Parkinson. Sun will provide customer support, with HDS engineers on the back end. When […]

Today’s rocky trade could be the pattern for a while, as stocks try to hammer out a bottom. A retest of Tuesday’s lows is likely at some point, and lower lows with plenty of fear and positive divergences might be the best scenario. So far it appears that Tuesday’s plunge is being viewed as an […]

U.S. stocks posted a modest rebound Wednesday, one day after their worst one-day drop in nearly four years. Soothing comments from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke helped stocks find their footing, and a strong recovery in Shanghai stocks, where Tuesday’s selling began, also encouraged bargain hunters. The Dow and S&P recovered as much as a third […]

We’ll start out with the easy part: last Friday’s buy signal under Gerald Appel’s Nasdaq-NYSE relative strength ratio is shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster. We’ll now note a reason why it’s not time to panic just yet: the next five trading days are historically the most positive of the month, as noted by […]

U.S. stocks suffered their worst one-day drop in nearly four years on Tuesday, plunging more than 3% on slowdown fears. An 8.8% overnight drop in Chinese stocks — the steepest decline on the Shanghai markets in a decade — started the sell-off, which spread to U.S. and European markets on a big drop in U.S. […]

HP is moving further into high-end network-attached storage (NAS) with the acquisition of PolyServe. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. HP said the deal — building on a two-year partnership between the two companies — gives it a strong presence in enterprise-class NAS and will also allow it to extend NAS technology to blades, […]