It was a wild and wooly day. The market was extremely negative in the morning. By mid-day they reached the session lows, and then had sharp a 3-wave snap back advance followed by a late pullback that pulled them off the rally highs.

The day started out with very negative overnight futures. The indices opened mixed, made very little headway early on and failed quickly in the early morning. They bounced, backed and filled and consolidated in what looked like potential bear flags and they certainly did roll over even harder, culminating in a sharp selling climax by mid-day. At that point they reversed, rallied sharply but then retested successfully and had an even sharper rally in the last hour; but the last 15 minutes saw another pullback, particularly on the Nasdaq 100.

Even though the Dow and S&P made it all the way back into positive territory, that late pullback brought them back into negative territory. The Dow was down 33.70, closing about 185 points off the low. The S&P 500 was down just 0.85, which was 24 points off the low. The Nasdaq 100 closed down 63.27, but that was 44 points off the low, so at one point it was down 107. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) was down 6.74, with the SMH falling to multi-month lows.

With all the gyrations the technicals were mixed but decidedly lower. Advance-declines were negative by 17 to 15 on New York and by 16 to 14 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume actually went positive on New York by 11 to 10, on just under 2.2 billion. Nasdaq traded a whooping 3.4 billion today, with about a 4 to 1 negative ratio. Nearly 2 3/4 billion shares traded to the downside today, and less than 700 million to the upside.

TheTechTrader.com board was very mixed with some big losers and gainers. Many stocks came off their lows, but could not take back all their losses. Market leaders GOOG down 39, BIDU down 37, APPL down nearly 11, and RIMM down 8 1/2 led the way today on the downside. In addition, VMware (VMW) lost 10.62. DryShips (DRYS), coming way off its lows, down more than 15 at one point, closed down 5.

Sigma Designs (SIGM) fell 2.70, Global Solutions (GSOL) 1.93, Excel Maritime (EXM) 2.64, China Medical Technologies (CMED) 2.11, and Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH) 1.75.

The Q's were down 1.62, but with strong energy prices the XLE was up 1.23 and the DUG was down 1.12, being a short oil & gas instrument. The QIDs were up 2.40, and the SDS up 0.43.

Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, key support was taken out early on, and various layers of support, including the 4-week lows on the Nasdaq 100 around 2117, as the NDX plunged to as low as 2066 today before bouncing back.

The S&P got clobbered down to 1450 before rallying, and took out key support at 1490 and then secondary support at 1480.

So technical damage was done today, and as indicated yesterday the downtrend was not only in force but accelerated to the downside today.

We'll see if they can stabilize and rally back, but despite the oversold indicators and oscillators the market may have had that thrust to the downside that broke the back of the multi-month trend, and the next few days will be very telling.

Harry Boxer is a technical consultant to many Wall Street hedge funds and large institutional traders, and author of TheTechTrader.com, a real-time diary of his day, swing and intermediate-term trades. For more of Harry Boxer, sign up for a free 15-day trial to his Real-Time Technical Trading Diary, or sign up for a free 30-day trial to his Top Charts of the Week service.