After spending most of Tuesday’s session in the red, stocks made one last push to close essentially flat and remain near their highs for 2011.
At two separate points, the market looked like a cinch for a day of losses — at around 3 p.m. EST, stocks were near their lows for the day with the S&P 500 off about 0.8%.
But it was all up from there — and at the closing bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up finishing down just 3 points on the day, to 11,977, the Nasdaq was up 2 points to 2719, and the S&P 500 rose a fraction to 1291.
If you weren’t looking at the last hour of stock market trading, you would’ve thought it was a rather drab day for investors: the Dow Jones Transportation Index continued to decline, earnings reports failed to excite, commodities slumped and the 10-year Treasury note rose, pushing the yield back toward 3.3% — since mid-December, the acting floor that has yet to cave.
Indeed, for most trades that took place in equities, the result was a negative one for sellers: NYSE declining volume outpaced advancing volume, by 622 million shares to 398 million shares.
But none of that necessarily matters for investors who are undoubtedly quite protective of a trendline that has boosted stocks significantly in the past four-and-a-half months.
With the ramp up before Tuesday’s close, it’s difficult to ascribe the day’s “winners” and “losers” any cause-and-effect other than getting caught in a day-end momentum updraft.
Still, a few outliers are worth noting: financials did not perform well, the SPDR Financial Select Sector (NYSE:XLF) exchange-traded fund was off slightly, but Dow components American Express (NYSE:AXP), which had reported in-line earnings late Monday, and Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) were the two worst performers in the top-30 index.
Commodities as a whole had their worst day in weeks: oil prices dropped by nearly 2% to near $86 a barrel, while natural gas also sank. Gold and silver dropped two three-month and two-month lows, respectively.
The drop in oil, of course, brings the usual good news/bad news scenario in terms of its boost for the consumer — as well as what it says about global demand.
A negative reading on U.K. GDP this morning only reinforced demand concerns, which certainly aren’t lessened by a two-week stock rut that this quarter’s earnings reports have yet to break.
