Stocks capped a strong week on a modest up note on Friday, buoyed by strong earnings from Microsoft.
The Nasdaq rose 15 to 1287, the S&P 500 added 5 to 884, and the Dow climbed 47 to 8322. Volume fell to 1.42 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.66 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led 16 to 15 on the NYSE, but advancers led 17 to 15 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 54% on the NYSE, and 61% on the Nasdaq.
Microsoft , PeopleSoft
, eBay
, Tellabs
and Nortel
rose on their earnings reports.
But Siebel , Check Point
, Advanced Fibre
, Scientific Atlanta
, Sun
and UTStarcom
fell on their results.
Oracle fell on a downgrade, but Cisco
rose despite more earnings worries.
Netflix surged 24% after beating estimates.
Some technical comments on the market: Note: To see the charts in the text email newsletter, click on the internetstockreport.com story link at the top of the newsletter.
The Dow (first chart) and S&P (second chart) didn’t quite make it to their May downtrend lines today, but could get there on Monday with a little push. A move above 8400 on the Dow and 890 on the S&P would look good, but the indexes are more likely to turn down there on the first attempt. Support is 877, 870, 855 and 835 on the S&P, and 8260, 8200, 8000 and 7900 on the Dow. The Nasdaq 100 (third chart) is at some pretty significant resistance too. Support on the NDX is 900-915, and on the Nasdaq (fourth chart) at 1267, 1250, 1220 and 1200. Stochastics (we’ve moved the settings to 5,3 for an earlier signal) on all indexes are overbought and giving tentative short-term sell signals. A break of those May downtrends would give the bullish case a big boost, but the market may need to pull back first. Finally, it was a tough expiration day for options traders, who found themselves whipped both ways, as evidenced by the extremes in the put-call ratio today: 1.4 on the open when the market was down, and .68 by the close, when the market finished up.
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