21 hours ago

The Stock Market Is Having a Bad Day Even If It Doesn't Look That Way

Breadth stinks, yet stocks are basically flat. Here’s how the S&P 500 pulled off that neat little trick.

With less than two hours to go in trading, the S&P 500 has dipped just 2.29 points—less than 0.1%—while the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off 0.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite is up 0.1%.But the market is much weaker than those numbers suggest. Just 137 of the S&P 500’s 502 stocks are up on the day—that’s just 27%, for those counting at home—what’s typically known as bad breadth.

For the S&P 500, however, it’s not the number of stocks that are up on the day that matter, but whether the ones that are up are enough to drive the index higher, or at least keep it from dropping too much. And that’s certainly the case today. Nvidia stock is up 2%, while Apple has risen 0.4%, and that’s enough to help the State Street Information Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF gain 0.4%. And that’s enough to keep the S&P 500 basically flat.