More Cracks in the Glass

Today was really a miserable day in the stock market. Yes the the markets ended up but if you peel back the onion there is not much to get excited about. Part of the end of the day rally was technical. You had Budweiser leaving the S&P 500 after the merger with InBev and replaced by a much smaller company. What this means is that all the index funds tracking the S&P 500 take alot of money from the old Budweiser investment and buy other S&P 500 companies in the last hour. I think you can see this in the Dow and the S&P 500. Both finished at or above up 1% on the day while the NASDAQ and the Russell 2000 was flat to down. You have alot of overlap between the S&P 500 and the Dow, not much with the NASDAQ. The rally was also very short in breadth lead mostly by Home Depot and Exxon. On the NYSE there were 1100 advancers while you had 1900 decliners. 350 companies set new 52 lows compared to 27 new highs. Financials were also down over 1% even though the markets rallied. So all in all I would say the glass cracked a little more and in a dangerous situation all the way around.

One thing that could get the market moving higher would be Obama's annoucement of some of his cabinent, especially the Treasury Secretary. That could be worth a several hundred point rally in itself.