Good Morning, Traders. UUUgggghhhhhhh. Ugly. No catalyst. Not moving. Dead in the water. Boring. Tiresome. Flat. Thesaurus, please! So we can pick up some more adjectives to describe this market. In the photo above, notice how in the first three days of this week, we could not seem to get away from the 200ma hourly (blue), as prices in the S&P 500 just chopped around in a tight range around that key moving average. A late day rally on Wednesday seemed to break us out of it and lo and behold, yesterday afternoon's selloff dumped us right back into the same range. The market just feels heavy here and cannot seem to get moving.

Today will bring a raft of employment data before the open which will certainly have effect on the premarket futures and the market at the open. Which way is impossible to tell at this point. One thing is for certain, however. If the data is construed as negative and the choppy area circled above between 1270 and 1280 in the SPX is violated, then we move to 1262 relatively quickly. Its not shown in the snapshot above, but if you draw a trendline on the daily $SPX, connecting all the swing lows of 2006, you come right to that aforementioned level. As we discussed in this forum in earlier issues, this area is also key because its very close to 2006 opening levels. Although its slope is rather tame, there is still an uptrend in place for 2006 which is underscored by the trendline whose terminus is at 1262. Any move down and subsequent close below this level will be extremely bearish for this market. Lets see what happens...... Near-term bias remains sideways with the overall bias upward as long as the S&P can hold that 1262.

Peter Reznicek is Chief Equity Strategist for ShadowTrader.net a subsidiary of thinkorswim, and a Principal of the Prana Fund, a hedge fund.  Mr. Reznicek can be reached at preznicek@shadowtrader.net.