The volatile action and wide trading ranges resumed in Tuesday’s session for the S&P 500 index futures, further establishing technical resistance with a quad top, and technical support with a double bottom. The action, mostly ruled by bears, came one day prior to the FOMC interest rate decision (2:00pm EDT Wednesday), subsequent press conference with Fed Chair Jerome Powell (2:30pm EDT) and earnings reports, including Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) set to be released after Wednesday’s close.
Overnight, the bears took the lead to drag the index futures down to test support at Monday’s low. Soon after testing that level, a bid was caught and the bulls began their steady climb back up into the green.
Right after the opening bell, the bulls continued their rally to the triple top, reaching a high of 5527.50. The buying spree didn’t last long at all, as the bears soon had control again. The subsequent decline continued steadily until the premarket low was breached, seemingly hitting a lot of stops from the bulls. After that dip, the premarket low, which coincided with Monday’s low, was tested again but the bulls failed to maintain a bid. Selling soon resumed to new intraday lows as the lunch hour commenced.
Once the lunch hour ended, the buy-the-dippers returned to defend support at last week’s low. From that point, it was a steady march back up to Monday’s low once again. For much of the afternoon, the bulls couldn’t get past resistance at that level. However, buyers breached resistance during the penultimate 10 minutes. Unfortunately, they couldn’t hold onto the late-day gains, and the bears took the index right back down during the final 10 minutes of the regular session.
The session concluded just below midrange on the day at 5472.50, losing 30.50 handles. In after hours trading, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) released their latest earnings report, which included slight beats on the top and bottom lines, but growth slowed (compared to expectations) for cloud services and future earnings were adjusted lower. The issue quickly dropped about 8%, dragging the index futures back down to match last week’s low, though both have since recovered some of those losses as of time of writing.
Among the top components of the index, JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM) emerged as the biggest gainer as of the close. The banking behemoth was able to advance by $4.27 or 2.02% to close at $215.19 for the day.
That performance was over two percent better than the cash index’s decline of 0.51%.
Conversely, the biggest loser ended up being NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA). Along with general weakness in the tech and chip sectors, market participants were anticipating bad news from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ: AMD) who were set to release their latest earnings report after the close. For the day, NVIDIA declined by $7.86 or 7.04% to close at $103.73. However, in after hours trading, AMD added about 6%, and NVIDIA about 2.5% from Tuesday’s close as of time of writing.
