Stocks finished slightly higher on Thursday. Major indices opened modestly higher, but quickly sold off following a mixed set of headlines. On the positive side, yields at the Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian bond auctions fell across the board. Demand for the two auctions in Italy and Spain was also high, which was a sigh of relief for markets. On the other hand, we had two U.S. economic reports that came in worse than expected – Retail Sales in December, and Weekly Jobless Claims.
Stocks spent the majority of the early morning diving, as the disappointing U.S. economic reports seemed to outweigh the improving sentiment in Europe. However, much like we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, after the initial morning selloff, the bulls planted firm and rallied stocks through the session.
An improving Bloomberg Consumer Comfort report and a lower than expected Business Inventories were today’s additional reports worth noting, though neither did much to really grab the market’s attention.
Stocks would rally from ~10:45am EST right up until about 5 minutes before the close, with a brief pullback that lasted from ~1:00pm-2:30pm EST. Sell programs were run at the close, leading major indices to finish just off of their intraday highs.
Thursday was a pretty good representation of some trends we’ve seen over the past few weeks. A gap higher at the open, immediate and aggressive selling for the early morning, then a mounted rally through the rest of the session, only to end the day at just about where we started (the SPY was -$0.07/share from $129.57 - $129.51 from open to close, with a $1.00 drawdown in between). Another theme that remained was the noticeable (at least for now) decoupling from all-things-Europe, whose headlines dominated every tick for the latter half of 2011. Thursday’s session could have been a real game changer either way, yet a mixed bag of news did not allow traders to commit to either side. We’ll be watching more next week as earnings season kicks into full swing.
Close Recap: S&P 500 +0.23%, NASDAQ +0.51%, DJIA +0.17%, Midcaps +0.23%.
Have a pleasant evening.
S&P 500 - Intraday
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