The markets ended on the plus side, closing at the afternoon highs, turning around after an early slide took it to new lows.

The day started out with a gap up on strong pre-market futures, but they immediately turned them lower and sold down sharply, reaching 1776 NDX and 1324 S&P before they turned it around with a steady move back up. They did have a mid-afternoon retest that held the intraday moving averages and lateral price support and then they rallied in the last hour taking them to new afternoon rally highs.

Net on the day the Dow was up 60.41, the S&P 500 up 6.11, and the Nasdaq 100 up just 3.80. That was because the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) put pressure on them all day, although the SOXX did recover 7 points from its low ,closing down only 0.72.

The technicals were positive by 3 to 2 on advance-declines on New York but just 15 to 13 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was a little less than 2 to 1 positive on New York, but only 4 to 3 positive on Nasdaq. Total volume was 1.2 billion New York and a little less than 1.8 billion on Nasdaq.

TheTechTrader.com board was extremely mixed and slightly negative in terms of more decliners than advancers. Leading the way was DryShips (DRYS), up 3.41, and iPCS (IPCS), which gained 2.15 to close at 31. Those were the only point-plus gainers on our board.

Other gainers of note, Energy Conversion Devices (ENER) gained 80 cents, Canadian Solar (CSIQ) 56 cents, BEXP up 65 cents to 9.29 on 3 1/3 million, Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH) 49 cents, Ascent Solar (ASTI) 35 cents, Excel Maritime (EXM) 43 cents, JA Solar (JASO) up 82 cents, WM snapped back 31 cents.

On the downside, the leader by far was Sigma Designs (SIGM) which got slam-dunked hard, down 5.36, closing at 15.67, an 18-month low on 10 million shares, on news that one of its biggest competitors, BRCM, was entering their market in an aggressive way.

Other losses included JST which fell 1.91, TSL down 1.48 & DCR closing at 4.15, down 1.40 as the price of oil continued to rise sharply.

Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, despite the fact that the indices went to new multi-session lows and new lows for the entire pullback, they did manage to right themselves and snap back into the positive column , reversing early losses and closing with gains for the day.

With cycle lows due in this time-frame we were due for a snapback move and we should be testing upper levels of resistance in the 1807-09 zone on the Nasdaq 100 and 1340-45 zone on the S&P 500.

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.