Good day! As the week winds to a close, the market doesn't look like it wants to break out of its daily range just yet. Thursday was another rather choppy day overall, but the market did have a nice downtrend in the morning and support held well with lows to lead to a pivot higher into the afternoon. This action began slowly as the indices gapped up very slightly into the open, falling into a smaller range on the 5 minute charts before the market turned lower off the SP500's prior day's highs.

It didn't take much time at all for the gap to fill. At that point the NASDAQ kept going, but the SP500 and Dow Jones Ind. Ave. moved into another sloppy range from about 10:30 ET to 11:30 ET when the market tried to form a 2B by putting in a very slightly lower low, but it never managed to set up on the 5 minute charts. The slowly rounding lows simply gave way, and did so rather quickly, bringing the market well into new intraday lows and taking the SP500 into price support from the prior day. This hit initially at 12:00 ET, but the pace was so strong that a correction needed to see it turn over. It did this by forming a 5 minute 2B by just barely breaking prior lows at a slower pace while holding Wednesday's SP500 lows.

As the market moved higher, it picked up pace, making lows less likely to break for the remainder of the day. Resistance hit as the market came into the zone of the late morning breakdown, which was also 5 minute 200 sma resistance in the SP500 and Dow. Given this increase in pace, it was likely that we'd see a Phoenix form if the market could hold in the upper 1/2-1/3 of the rally off lows as it corrected. It did this well with decreasing volume right into the moving average support and 14:00 ET reversal period to trigger the Phoenix, this time in the form of a Cup with Handle, going into the latter half of the afternoon. After putting in an equal move and coming into price and moving average resistance on the 15 minute charts around 14:30 ET, the market was done. We started to see a turnover with an Avalanche forming along the 5 minute 20 sma, but the market chose instead to just hold a small 5 minute range for the last 90 minutes of the day, making for an uneventful close ahead of Friday's jobs data.

On a positive note for swingtraders, even though the market overall has been pretty choppy, we got lucky with some decent swingtrades this week. CVD and AFFX are creeping up slowly and ANF put in a large gap to put in new highs. All of these are now no loss trades with trailing stops on any remaining shares. Regarding the market as a whole, we are still seeing that weekly NASDAQ Avalanche form but there is not yet a great bias in terms of market pace within the range for a short. I will be using some higher risk on swingtrade buys though for as long as the 50 and 100 day sma remain just overhead in the NASDAQ.

Toni Hansen is President and Co-founder of the Bastiat Group, Inc., and runs the popular Trading From Main Street. She can be reached at Toni@tradingfrommainstreet.com