The stock market indices gapped up and then slid all morning until midday when they hit their session lows. In the afternoon they rallied back to bring the indices back into a mixed position.

Net on the day, the Dow was up 20.43 at 11,691.18. The S&P 500 was down 1.69 at 1270.20, and the Nasdaq 100 down 2.77 at 2251.46.

The technicals were decidedly negative today with advance-declines 19 to 11 negative on the New York Stock Exchange, and about 18 to 8 1/2 negative on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was 3 to 2 negative on New York with total volume of about 1 billion shares. Nasdaq traded just under 2 billion shares and had about a 10 to 9 negative ratio.

TheTechTrader.com board was mixed, although pretty dead-even in terms of advancers and decliners. However, there were some outstanding issues today. Molycorp, Inc. (MCP) jumped 4.30 to 61.80, and XOMA Ltd. (XOMA) 2.01 to 7.31. Those were the two outstanding stocks today, along with China Shen Zhou Mining & Resources, Inc. (SHZ) up 1.50 to 9.80, at one point trading as high as 10.83.

Other stocks of note included Cosan Ltd. (CZZ) up 71 cents to 14.57, Power-One Inc. (PWER) up 34 cents to 10.47, and Radient Pharmaceuticals Corporation (RPC) up 38 cents to 1.67, a substantial percentage gain there. Apple Inc. (AAPL) advanced 1.72 to 331.29.

Those were the only point-plus gainers on our board today.

On the downside, gold and silver suffered tremendously today as gold dropped about $45 an ounce and silver dropped $1.75. Golden Minerals Company (AUMN) was down 1.07 to 25.77, Gold Resource Corp (GORO) 1.24 to 27.60, Amtech Systems Inc. (ASYS) 1.57 to 24.42, and Cognex Corp. (CGNX) 1.53 to 28.75. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (CMG) lost 1.26 to 222.37, trading as high as 228.47 earlier in the day and as low as 216.96.

In addition, Coinstar Inc. (CSTR) dropped 1.04 to 55.72, IDT Corporation (IDT) 1.02 to 25.60, OmniVision Technologies Inc. (OVTI) 1.00 to 28.00, and SodaStream International Ltd. (SODA) 1.52 to 28.82.

Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, the indices gapped up at the opening, sold off immediately and sharply to set the session lows near NDX 2238 and SPX 1262.50, and then bounced back in the afternoon to close mixed on the session.

Nevertheless, with negative technicals and the market showing signs of severe loss of momentum and negative divergences, I’m not sure how much further this market can go before we get a more substantial soft sell-off.

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