An extremely negative day on the Street!  It started out with pre-market negative futures, which told the story about the opening, a decisive gap lower. 

After a brief bounce the market went lower for the entire morning.  They held key support at around the lunch hour, and tried to bounce, which failed at resistance, rolled over, and spiked down sharply, taking out support and testing key secondary support at 1570 NDX, which is the rising 9-day bottoms line.  The S&P 500 tested an even more important support line, the 6-week rising bottom line at the bottom of the trend channel.  Then they backed and filled into the close.

Net on the day, the Dow was down 63, the S&P 500 13, and the Nasdaq 100 31 Ã,½, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOXX) down nearly 15 points, leading the way.  Semiconductors got hammered today.

The technicals told the story, with advance-declines 26 Ã,½ to 6 Ã,½, or a 4 to 1 negative ratio, on New York, and more than 3 to 1 negative on Nasdaq.  Up/down volume was extremely negative today, with a more than 5 to 1 negative ratio on a total of 1.4 billion traded on New York.  Nasdaq was worse, nearly 10 to 1 negative today on total volume of about 1 Ã,¾ billion. 

Despite the fact that volume wasnââ,¬â"¢t extremely heavy, losses were broad.  TheTechTrader.com board was extremely negative with only two stocks up today.  NRMX gained 99 cents, Oralab (OLAB) cents, but everything else was down.

The loss leader was Energy Conversion Devices (ENER) down nearly 3 points.   NVE Corp. (NVEC), which had a dramatic 6-point negative reversal today, was up 3 points in the morning and closed down 2 Ã,½ near the lows for the day.

Other losses of note, DXP Enterprises (DXPE) dropped 2.23, PW Eagle (PWEI) 1.47, Broadcom (BRCM) 1.58, Akamai (AKAM) 1.58, Apple Computer (AAPL) 1.45, Vertex (VRTX) 1.34, and Qualcomm (QCOM) 1.15.

It was a very broadly lower day on my board, and a large negative technical plurality today on both exchanges.

With the indices closing at the lows for the day and below key short-term support, the back of this rally may have been broken.  Weââ,¬â"¢ll see if any further downside follow-through can take out further key support.

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.