Good morning! As the volume continues to drop following the volatile trading of the past couple of weeks, the intraday action has begun to stabilize. Volume finally returned to normal on Monday and the market showed a lot less chop overall. The gainers and losers lists also began to show more of the popular stocks, such as AAPL, ESRX, AKAM, BA, GOOG on the top gainers list and KBH, COST and APOL on the losers list. As a whole the indices saw a decent uptrend day throughout the session, and the top three posted gains into the close. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJI) rose 42.30 points (+0.3%), while the S&P 500 ($SPX) climbed 3.75 points (+0.3%), and the Nasdaq Composite ($COMPX) gained 14.74 points (+0.6%). Other top gainers included LEH, MER, BSC, MS, T, INTC, DG, and GM, while AIG, NDE, CFC, NEW, HD, WMT and most of the home builders lost ground.

Early on in the session there wasn't much to look at. The indices opened with little change from Friday's close and quickly fell into a choppy, sideways move. As this congestion progressed into noon, however, volume declined on the downside with slower overall selling than buying, creating a bullish pattern that broke higher with the 12:00 ET correction period. The break was hesitant at first, which is pretty normal when any trend channel breaks, but it increased in momentum within about 15 minutes and the indices were soon back at the highs from the last half hour of trading on Friday and first half hour on Monday. This resistance stalled the bulls and led to the second major intraday correction on the 15 minute charts.

After a solid sideways trend on declining volume, hitting the lightest levels as the 15 minute 20 sma approached, the market again broke higher. This was the strongest upside momentum of the day and took the market back into the highs of the previous two sessions. Since the indices had a decent move by the time they hit, these larger resistance zones ended the rally. The pace was so strong, however, that it made it difficult for the indices to simply pivot and fall off the highs. They compensated by pulling back more gradually and then basing, creating an Avalanche short pattern that allowed the sellers to come back in force and dropped the indices back into the mid-day range support at that 15 minute 20 sma again, which held into the close.







In the grand scheme of things, not much has changed regarding my market bias in the last couple of trading days. I continue to watch for a larger trading range on the daily and weekly charts with the 20 and 50 day simple moving averages serving as the strongest resistance that will need to break to force the market into a larger range and the 200 day sma as support should the indices fail to gain momentum on the 60 minute charts and instead hold those daily sma resistance levels.

Economic Reports and Events This Week
Tuesday:
7:45a.m. ICSC Chain Store Sales. Previous: -0.4%.
8:30a.m. Feb Retail And Food Sales. Previous: Unch.
8:30a.m. Feb Retail And Food Sales, Ex-Autos. Previous: +0.3%.
8:55a.m. Redbook Retail Sales Index. Previous: -1.1%.
10:00a.m. Jan Business Inventories. Previous: Unch.
5:00p.m. ABC/Wash Post Consumer Conf. Previous: -1.

Wednesday:
7:45a.m. MBA Refinancing Index. Previous: +15%.
8:30a.m. Feb Import Prices. Previous: -1.2%.
8:30a.m. 4Q Current Account Gap. Previous: $225.6B.

Thursday:
8:30a.m. Initial Jobless Claims. Previous: -10K.
8:30a.m. Feb Producer Price Index. Previous: -0.6%.
8:30a.m Feb Producer Price Index, Ex-Food & Energy. Previous: +0.2%.
8:30a.m. Mar NY Fed Manufacturing Index. Previous: 24.35.
9:00a.m. Jan Treasury Intl Capital Flows. Previous: -$11.0B.
10:00a.m. DJ-BTMU Business Barometer. Previous: -0.2%.
10:00a.m Mar Philadelphia Fed Business Index. Previous: 0.6.

Friday:
8:30a.m. Feb Consumer Price Index. Previous: +0.2%.
8:30a.m. Feb Consumer Price Index, Ex-Food & Energy. Previous: +0.3%.
9:15a.m. Feb Industrial Production. Previous: -0.5%.
9:15a.m. Feb Capacity Utilization. Previous: 81.2%.
10:00a.m. Mid-Mar Reuters/U Of Mich Sentiment Index. Previous: 91.3.

Key Earnings Announcements This Week
Tuesday: CALOY, SAM, DKS, GIGM, GS, GYMB, REV, SAPE, BKE, KR
Wednesday: CBM, HIBB, HOTT, JUPM, LEH, TRK, SSI
Thursday: ARO, BSC, BONT, CLE, LGND, PSUN, TRLG
Friday: ANN, KIRK
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.