The indices had a very interesting and volatile session, but closed near the zero line and narrowly mixed.

The day started out with a gap down. A sharp move lower brought the indices down below their recent support of the last couple sessions, but above the support of last week’s low. When they were unable to follow through to the downside, they ended up bouncing around for several hours, consolidating in what looked like bear flags for another leg lower, but in the afternoon they suddenly took off, broke through resistance, and then spiked up sharply on what appeared to be short covering, reaching near the mid-day highs of Friday’s session at 1500 NDX and 846 SPX. A last 20-25 minute pullback brought them back into mixed territory.

Net on the day the Dow was up just 1.36 at 8764.49, the S&P 500 down 0.95 at 939.14, and the Nasdaq 100 down 4.72 at 1488.49. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) lost 0.15 to 270.59.

Advance-declines were negative by 19 to 11, or a little worse than 3 to 2, on New York and by better than 3 to 2 on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was 3 to 2 negative on New York on total volume of just over 1 billion. Nasdaq traded lighter volume as well, just 1.8 billion shares, and had about a 5 to 4 volume ratio.

TheTechTrader.com board was mostly narrowly changed, and mostly to the downside.

Leading the way down were the ag/chem stocks, with Potash (POT) down 1.69 at 111.94 and Mosaic (MOS) down 1.37 at 51.76. Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH) dropped 1.13 to 25.22.

The only point-plus gainer on our board was Palomar Medical (PMTI), which we added to our portfolio today. It jumped to 17.74, up 1.01 on 3 million shares.

Financials were general positive today, with JP Morgan (JPM) up 84 cents to 35.39, Morgan Stanley (MS) up 42 cents to 31.39, Wells Fargo (WFC) up 67 cents to 25.39, and Bank of America (BAC) up 20 cents to 12.06.

Other than that, there were very small, fractional changes across the board, and that includes the ETFs, which also had narrow changes today.

We’ll see what that means to the trend over the next day or two. But today certainly was interesting with morning downside pressure and afternoon upside pressure before the late sell-off pulled them back once again to close near the zero line.

Harry Boxer is a technical consultant to many Wall Street hedge funds and large institutional traders, and author of TheTechTrader.com.