By Elizabeth Stanton
March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Stock trading during yesterday’s 4.3 plunge in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was 21 percent below the level on Nov. 20, when the index sank to an 11-year low, a sign to some analysts that the worst isn’t over.
“There’s just no sign of a bottom,” said John Murphy, chief technical analyst at StockCharts.com in Oradell, New Jersey. Technical analysis, Murphy’s field since 1968, involves mining price and volume data to make forecasts.
As the S&P 500 fell to 682.55 yesterday, its lowest close since September 1996, volume on U.S. exchanges totaled 12.6 billion shares. That’s 36 percent less than on Oct. 10, last year’s busiest day, when the stock index completed an 18 percent drop that was the steepest weekly decline in 75 years. New York Stock Exchange volume totaled 1.88 billion shares yesterday, 37 percent below its 2008 peak.
About 16.1 billion shares traded on Nov. 20, when the S&P 500 dropped 6.7 percent to 752.44, the lowest level since April 1997.
The S&P 500 tumbled 56 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 53 percent to 6,594.44 from their October 2007 records. They may retreat to 660 and 6,000, respectively, Murphy said. Some previous sell-offs have ended with a surge in volume, he added.
“People just get so disgusted that they throw in the towel and you get a sharp down day on big volume,” he said. “We haven’t seen that.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Stanton in New York at estanton@bloomberg.net.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment