Good morning! Trading was slow and choppy on Tuesday as the shortened trading week began. There were several nice trend moves intraday, but the follow-through was a bit erratic. The bears ruled the open, gapping the indices lower with the help of disappointing news from Home Depot (HD). Oil and gold stocks also weighed heaving on the indices at that time after turning around off the short-term highs in the past week or so.

The early morning weakness lasted throughout the first half hour of trading, but after running into their 10 day simple moving averages, the Dow Jones Ind. Ave. and S&P 500 called it quits and began to reverse. The buying was just as hesitant as the selling, but a lot of the blue-chip stocks held up very well and aided the bulls. WMT, MCD, and JPM were just a few to make new highs on the year on Tuesday. Positive earnings from Wal-Mart (WMT) brought the stock back into the zone of the highs from the last year and a half.

The upside momentum increases slightly after 11:00 ET, but slowed again into noon, creating rounded highs on the 5 minute charts as volume waned. Soon the sellers were trying to take over, but they were unable to firmly grasp the lead and quickly ran into support at the 5 minute 20 sma. By hugging the support for about half an hour, they were able to form a continuation short pattern in the form of an avalanche or reverse cup with handle into 13:00. The move was not able to generate much interest, however, and the light volume simply created a larger bull flag or breakout type of pattern into 14:00 ET. It was not long enough of a correction to bring in much momentum again in that direction though and the indices just crept higher into 15:00 and continued to languish into the close.







There is a bit more of a bearish bias intraday heading into the day on Wednesday, due primarily to the light volume on the slower than average upside move throughout the afternoon. It doesn't take much to turn things back around intraday though and many stocks remain strong on the daily time frames. As a result, I will be treating the short side with a great deal of caution, focusing primarily on the smaller intraday time frames, even for entering any potential swing trade shorts.

Economic Reports and Events This Week
Monday: -
Tuesday: -
Wednesday: CPI and Core CPI for Jan. (8:30 am), Leading Indicators for Jan. (10:00 am), Crude Inventories 2/16 (10:30 am), FOMC Minutes - Jan. 31 (2:00 pm)
Thursday: Initial Claims 2/17 (8:30 am), Help-Wanted Index for Jan. (10:00 am)
Friday: -

Key Earnings Announcements This Week
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday: ANF, AEM, EFD, EEFT, FRP, GPI, HSIC, IHP, JBX, LEXG, LOJN, MT, NTBK, NICE, ORB, PAAS, PDLI, PRFT, POSS, TRK, STXS, TASR, TWB, ZLC
Thursday: AZ, AGIX, ABX, BEAS, CHK, DNR, BOOM, HLTH, ENDP, ESV, FBR, HRB, HMA, HPT, IMH, INWK, INPC, INTU, SFI, JCP, KSE, LAMR, MEMY, MDG, MOVE, NXL, NAM, NBL, OMX, PKD, PDCO, PTEN, PCG, PXP, PGI, QLTI, PWR, RTI, SWY, SRE, SM, TELK, TOL, LNUX, WMB
Friday: AVR, CCU, CTV, LOW, SWC, WRI
Note: All economic numbers and earnings reports are in lines with those compiled by Yahoo Finance and Briefing.com. Occasionally changes will occur that are made after the posting of this column. This list is not a complete list of earnings, so always double check your positions!

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.