The 2005 market slide continued today with a vengeance. The market started out with a big gap down after eBay's (EBAY) negative earnings announcement last night, and the market crushed that stock early by over 20 points, sending the NDX down sharply at the opening.

The NDX gapped down over 20 points, and bounced around in the morning. The S&P also gapped down but by a smaller amount. By mid-day when two rally attempts failed to break through initial resistance, the market rolled over into new lows for the session. A post-lunch hour rally failed at resistance as they have pretty much all year and the market then rolled over into the close, with the NDX closing right near the lows for the session. The S&P did not take out the mid-day lows and closed above them. So we have a minor non-confirmation and potential positive divergence.

Net on the day the Dow was down 68 1/2 and the S&P 500 down 9 1/4, but Nasdaq really got hurt today, down 31 on the NDX and 27 3/4 on the Composite. The SOX was down 3, and about 8 points off the high when it was up today.

Advance-declines were 19 to 8 negative on New York and 21 to 9 negative on Nasdaq. Ugly numbers, to say the least. Up/down volume was about 8 to 3 negative on New York, with total volume of about 1.1 billion. Nasdaq volume was about 1.85 billion, with 1 1/3 billion of it to the downside, about 2 1/2 to 1 negative.

TheTechTrader.com board was mixed but mostly down. On the upside, Nitromed (NTMD) was up 59, Parlux Fragrances (PARL) up 43 cents, and Spatialight (HDTV) up 15 cents. Those were the leaders. On the downside, CryptoLogic (CRYP) dropped 72 cents, Mikron (MIKR) was off 68 cents, and Nanogen (NGEN) fell 43 more cents.

The loss leader was Zoltek (ZOLT), down 1.12, continuing its pullback from its recent run.

Stepping back and reviewing the overall patterns, as indicated earlier the 2005 market slide continues. The breakdown today took out last week's double bottom on the NDX at 1543 and set us into our second major downleg on this drop.

The S&P held most of the day, but that mid-day drop did go slightly below the lows of last week and closed right around them.

Tomorrow I'll be watching the bottom of the three-week down-channel near 1502-05 on the NDX and the 1165-68 area on the S&P to see whether those levels can hold.

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.