Stock Market News: Dow Slips After Three-Day Rally
The S&P 500 pushed past 5500 in early afternoon trading.
The market benchmark was at session highs, up 0.7% to 5523.07 in early afternoon trading. The index has struggled to break the 5500 level all week, as rallies fizzled out right around that mark in recent days.
The Nasdaq Composite was up 1.3%, as consumer discretionary and tech stocks lifted the market. The Dow as up 14 points, or pretty much flat.
For the S&P, the 5500 level has acted as resistance because it’s where the market rebounded in the middle of March and then where it fell sharply in recent weeks.
“Right now, the S&P 500 is acting as well as we could hope for if we’re going to make a run back to new highs,” Frank Cappelleri, founder of technical analysis firm CappThesis, told Barron’s on Thursday. “The index has been forming a constructive bullish pattern since the lows earlier this month, with an obvious resistance level up near 5500, which everyone is watching.”
After a run of strong breadth, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF was down 0.2%. The ETF weighs every S&P 500 stock the same, so it can act as a proxy for market breadth. Only 212 S&P 500 stocks were rising.