What if they held a stock market and nobody cared?
Monday marked a trading session where the combination of the year-end holidays and a major snowstorm throughout the East Coast trumped the interest most investors had in the rise or fall of their portfolios.
In fact, it was easily the least cared about day in 2010 — as Briefing.com noted a few minutes before Monday’s closing bell, only 370 million shares had changed hands at the New York Stock Exchange, well below the year’s previous low of about 428 million shares during the half-day session after Thanksgiving.
As one could have expected, the market’s top indices followed suit: the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.2% to 11,555 while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 were essentially flat.
The Dow was propped up by a relatively strong session in shares of Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which closed up 2.6% to a six-and-a-half week closing high of $20.12 — although still roughly 25% below their 2010 high set in mid-May.
Elsewhere, the session was mixed when it wasn’t merely flat, and the few investors paying attention on Monday were given little to determine what any of it meant.
Financials had a strong session — the Financial Select Sector SPDR (NYSE:XLF) exchanged-traded fund rose 0.9% to $16.01, back to a level seen last Wednesday, while the iShares MSCI Emerging Index (NYSE:EEM) ETF slipped 0.3%, possibly from reaction to China’s decision overnight to boost one-year lending and deposit rates.
However, the drift (in stocks, not snow) has been intact going back to early in last Wednesday’s trading: the S&P 500, for example, has traded within a 0.5% range ever since — a headache to few, other than option traders long volatility.
Commodities mostly followed the market’s lead on Monday — oil closed down 0.5% to $90.51 a barrel — while the 10-year Treasury note caught a bid that took yields down to 3.35%, setting up a possible intersection with a technical trendline headed up since early November.
As with the newsflow and market developments of last week, however, the true effect of Monday’s happenings may not be fully realized until a full roster of traders return.
Take the Chinese rate hike, for example. A worrier could note the Shanghai Composite Index has now slipped more than 12% in 2010 (including a 1.9% drop on Monday), and what does it mean for investors here and abroad in 2011 that Chinese stocks were the ones leading the rest of the global market higher after 2009’s credit-crisis selloff?
