Another Day, Another Bottom

You'd expect a better day in the stock market than today because it's not everyday that you get the President to sign into law an Economic Stimulus Package as Obama did today.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. It certainly takes more than $787 billion to impress Wall Street.

Today's trading volume at the NYSE was on the lower end of the upper range. And if you consider that the markets were closed on Monday, the significance of the high volume diminishes. The same could be said of the NASDAQ.

On the NYSE, the market bested (or is it worsted?), last November 20th low close though we were 2 billion shares short of the high trading volume. If we are to breakthrough last year's lows, we'll need a big push which calls for higher volumes than we have seen today. Frankly, I don't know what it means if we break through on light volume but it may mean that the worst is still to come.

Surprisingly, the volume at the last hour of trading was not high, which means that institutional investors are not bailing out and it is probably the dumb money (retail investors) who are bailing out.