Good day! The market surprised me on Wednesday, displaying a great deal of activity even despite the afternoon's Fed announcement. The indices themselves remained rather skeptical and gapped slightly lower at the beginning of Wednesday's session, but a number of individual stocks managed to outperform, as well as underperform the overall market. Top gainers included TIE, MHK, OMX, X, RIMM, CDWC, BUCY, and APOL. Top losers were AL, DL, ISE, LM, CSCO, and ERTS.

Despite the greater opportunity for stock traders, things remained slow for those focusing on futures. The gap closed heading into the 10:15 ET reversal period, but then the indices pulled back slightly into 11:00 ET. The volume in the market began to decline at this point, which bode well for the bulls since it did lead to a small upside move out of that reversal period, but was also a reflection of the upcoming Fed announcement and greater hesitancy from individual investors.

After pulling into the previous highs the market based sideways into 12:30 ET, establishing a low within the range right at the 12:00 ET reversal period. This led quickly to new highs on the day. I had made the decision by that point to go ahead and sit out after a nice morning of trading to wait for the Fed. The result was that I missed some very nice mid-day breakouts, closing the Nasdaq's morning gap and took the Dow once again to new all-time highs.

The market slowed again in the hour before the Fed on Wednesday. The indices pulled back very slowly and then became more exciting when the Fed left rates unchanged and announced that they expected moderate economic growth to continue. The first reaction was to the downside, but then returned with a much stronger secondary move and then a weaker tertiary move. This meant that even though the original reaction was to the downside, the bulls were the ones in charge and the market rallied strongly just prior to 15:00 ET. A smaller counter-move took it into the 15:30 ET reversal period where the market again bounced, albeit to a much lesser degree than before.







The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJI) closed higher by 53.80 points on Tuesday, while the S&P 500 ($SPX) gained 4.86 points, and the Nasdaq Composite ($COMPX) rose 4.49 points. Even though the market has been struggling at the highs, we still are not seeing any strong change in momentum or any upside exhaustion move that would allow for a longer daily correction just yet. I am likely to continue to focus primarily on the stocks this week as opposed to the futures.

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.