Market Analysis for Oct 15th, 2003

The markets this morning have been very interesting, first off because of the Intel (INTC) earnings and some banking earnings that were very impressive, which was mostly expected but even better than expected. This popped the stock indexes overnight and pre-market this morning. The indices made new recovery highs from the lows of last March. In the E-minis, for instance, our next target range after 1049-51 was 1056, and today's high so far is 1055.75. Our target for the E-Mini Nasdaq was 1440-44, and today's high was 1444 ,.

What's interesting is that from those targets we had a very violent down first hour, so after the first 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes were straight down. Not only did that action retrace all of the upmove of the day to that point, it filled the gap area left behind on the opening as well. So there were a couple of interesting technical negatives associated with the first hour of trading.

However, the most salient feature of all is the answer to the question of did that downmove of the first hour inflict any damage on the near-term uptrend? That near-term uptrend we look at is from Tuesday a week ago -- from 1024