Today has been one of those sessions where your pre-existing biases determine how you viewed the action.
For the bears, it was another day of stalling action -- with some relative weakness in big-cap names like Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN). Maybe it was just nervousness ahead of Apple's (AAPL) earnings report, but the Nasdaq 100 has been lagging lately and that's generally not a good sign.
For the bulls, the focus was mainly on the market's strong underlying support and very good breadth. The bears simply couldn't generate any real downside momentum. Even oils and metals bounced back after some lackluster action earlier in the session.
Small-caps have been offsetting the big-cap-technology weakness and keeping breadth quite perky. This sort of action tells us that traders still have an appetite for risk and aren't feeling any fear, although the indices' upside has been limited.
This mixed action is a good setup for a strong move tomorrow when the Federal Open Market Committee makes its interest-rate decision at 2 p.m. ET. While markets don't expect a rate hike, there will be intense scrutiny of the committee's latest policy statement.
As I've often written, the market loves to love the Fed. There will be plenty of bears looking for a "sell-the-news" reaction, but that hasn't been a good approach recently.
Overall, the indices remain healthy technically speaking. We've simply been churning for a while as we await the market's next major catalyst. There's a chance that will come tomorrow afternoon when the Fed makes its announcement.
Until then, have a good evening. I'll see you tomorrow.
