There is good news for traders today as intraday volatility has picked up and we have a mix of action we haven't seen too often recently. The Nasdaq-100 ETF (QQQ) pulled back sharply after a strong open and the Russell 2000 (IWM) is at the lows of the day and trying to stay in positive territory.
While the action in the indices isn't very positive, breadth is running very strong. There are over 4,100 advancers to around 2,350 decliners. The weakness in the FAANG names is covering that up to a great degree.
The good news is that there is still some good movement for stock pickers. I mentioned Nutanix (NTNX) and Ichor Holding (ICHR) earlier and will be adding to those positions as they develop further. There are still a number of biotechnology names that are acting well also.
The big danger in this market is that it is easy to overreact to any shift in the price action. A day or two of selling might excite some bears that have been suffering through an endless uptrend, but in the bigger scheme of things it is healthy to have some weak action.
Even the most bullish bulls have been complaining about how hard it is becoming to find new setups, so some weaker action can be quite refreshing. I like the action I'm seeing in quite a few individual stocks, so it is hard to be too negative even if we do have a negative intraday reversal in some of the indices.
We will see how things close, but the bears still have quite a bit more work to do if they are going to push some money to the exits.
