Stocks rose Friday on stronger than expected employment numbers, but blue chips gave back much of those gains on a negative SEC filing by GE.
The ISDEX http://www.wsrn.com/apps/ISDEX/ surged 7 to 173, and the Nasdaq rose 48 to 1929. The S&P 500 added 6 to 1164, and the Dow climbed 47 to 10,572. Volume declined to 1.42 billion shares on the NYSE, but rose to 2.05 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led 16 to 14 on the NYSE, and 22 to 12 on the Nasdaq.
GE gave up strong gains to end lower on concerns about receivables and exposure to special purpose entities.
But techs were strong all day, largely on better expected guidance from Sun Microsystems , which surged 13%.
Intel gained 3% despite a lukewarm outlook and analyst concerns about the company’s high valuation. Chip stocks surged on the day.
Microsoft managed to close higher despite a $1 billion lawsuit by Sun alleging that Windows XP was made incompatible with Java.
IBM a point despite investor nervousness ahead of the company’s 10-Q filing on Monday.
Juniper surged 13% to continue strong recent gains. QLogic
and Brocade
were 10% gainers.
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.
Some very nice weekly closes on a few key indexes: The S&P (first chart) took out its downtrend line, which should now be support at around 1140; the XMI (second chart) finished the week above the important 1060 level; and the SOX (third chart), the semiconductor index, blew through 620 resistance on the second try, making 610-620 support for next week. One red flag is that commercial futures traders, the so-called smart money, are shorter the S&P than they have been at anytime since the May 2001 peak, which argues for some sort of near-term correction. The other side of that equation, the small speculators, are record long. Not a good sentiment picture at all. The Dow weekly (fourth chart) faces a ton of resistance from 10,700-10,800. In the Dow daily (fifth chart), the index continues to struggle with the upper trendline of what could be a broadening top; if it can clear that and keep going, that would be bullish. A move below 10,525 could signal the start of a correction. The S&P (sixth chart) has resistance at 1173-1177 and support at 1150, 1140 and 1130. The Nasdaq (seventh chart) is back at 1934-1940 resistance, and 1960 is above that. Support is 1905, 1895, 1880 and 1850.
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