Market Wrap

Nasty day in the market. If you watch the business news shows or listen to the media, you'll probably only hear about oil hitting $60. Someone savvy might try to throw in the negative rhetoric swirling over China during Greenspan's testimony today as a reason.

But the market was actually fairly flat most of the day. It wasn't until the last couple of hours of trading that the market started selling off. And oil has been hovering near $60 for days now.

So the technician in me thinks part of it is as simple as the fact that when the market took out the 1210-level on the S&P 500, which has been support for several days in a row, the selling accelerated. Don't kid yourself and not think that there are tons of hair-trigger sellers out there who place stops at levels like this, and sell as soon as those stops are triggered.

Now that doesn't help you very much to figure out where the market will go tomorrow or the next day, but if you follow the internals of the market intra-day like me, the late day sell-off was more due to technical levels than the high price of oil.