The markets had an interesting session on Thursday. They were very volatile in the morning and then they narrowed and got quiet mid-day. But when they failed to break down and successfully tested on three different occasions, the indices took off after lunch and had a very strong afternoon rally, closing near or at the highs for the day going away on most of the indices.

The Dow was up 75, the S&P up 9.40, and the Nasdaq 100 and Composite were both up more than 20 1/2. The SOX Index was up a whopping 2 1/2 percent, or more than 10 points today, and that really helped Nasdaq.

Advance-declines were 2 to 1 positive on New York, with up/down volume 2 1/2 to 1 positive on a total of just about 1.5 billion on New York. Nasdaq was a little better than 3 to 2 positive on advance-declines, with up/down volume also about 2 1/2 to 1 positive. Total volume there was more than 2 billion today.

So volume picked up on the way up and that's a positive sign.

TheTechTrader.com trading board had a few outstanding issues. CRYP, one of our Charts of the Week Watchboard stocks, was up 1.42, hitting a new multi-year high. IMAX snapped back from recent profit-taking, and was up 1.12 on 2.8 million shares.

Other stocks of note, WPTE was up 58 cents. WLM, one of our Charts of the Week, was up 32 cents. SIGM on a takeover rumor with Broadcom ,was up 26 cents, and ENER was up 38 cents.

On the large-cap board, the SMH was up 70 cents, the QQQQ 47 cents, and BRCM up 60 cents.

On the downside, AIRT gave back another 1.07 and has dropped about 5 points just in the last several days. Other losses were mostly just fractional. NGEN dropped 30 cents to near major support at about 4.

Stepping back and reviewing the overall patterns, the afternoon rally came as a surprise to many traders, as key short-term resistance was broken. But the indices closed at important and very formidable resistance near 1520 area on the Nasdaq 100 and the 1200 area on the S&P 500.

Those are areas we'll be watching for tomorrow to see if the market can break back through and achieve higher levels, or whether it turns back to do some retesting at least.

Good trading!

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.