Indices had a very interesting day, with various swings during the course of the session, ending on a sour note, however, with an afternoon selloff. The day started out with a move down that severely tested the week's lows but held. They bounced, consolidated mid-morning, and then just before the lunch hour had a very sharp, quick up move, that broke them out of short-term resistance, but once again failed at more important resistance, on the S&P 500, near the six-week declining tops lines.

They pulled back to retest and bounced briefly, but then broke lower late in the afternoon and ended negatively, with all the indices down on the session. The Dow was down 30 points and closed below 11,000. The S&P 500 dropped 1.10, the Nasdaq 100 3.44, and the SOX semiconductor index down 3.78.

Technicals were mixed to slightly negative. Advance/declines were about 60 issues lower in New York, and about 80 issues lower on Nasdaq. Up/down volume was about a little less than 4 to 3 positive on New York, with 1.4 billion traded there. Nasdaq was about 9 to 7 negative, with about 1.6 billion traded.

TheTechTrader.com board was fairly narrowly mixed. There were a couple of outstanding issues. Blackboard (BBBB) surged $3.70 on nearly 1.5 million, and closed over $28 today. Rambus (RMBS) was up $1.43 on 8.3 million. Those were the leading gainers today on our board.

Other stocks of note, Baidu.com (BIDU) advanced 80 cents, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals (BCRX) 63 cents, Dynamic Materials Corp. (BOOM) 56 cents, and DXP Enterprises (DXPE) 62 cents. Medifast (MED) snapped back 45 cents and Radiation Therapy (RTSX) came back 74 cents. SIMCLAR (SIMC) advanced 73 cents today, and Qiao Xing ( XING) another 50 cents.

Stepping back and reviewing the hourly chart patterns, the consolidation of the last several days continued, as the market failed to take out support or resistance. The potential head and shoulders bottoming pattern on the S&P 500, in particular, is still intact, but getting a little long in the tooth and unless they breakout early last week, there's a chance that we may see a crack of support and a test of the recent lows. But we'll see how it goes on Monday. Have a good weekend.

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.