S&P 500 Chart – August 22, 2008

My Sunday series of index charts continues today with the S&P 500 ($SPX).  This time I took a shorter view and only went back three months to see a daily view of the price changes.  The SPX is getting to an interesting place in its trend line movement.  The longer term downward trend of lower highs is coming to a point soon with the upward trend of higher lows.  One of the trend lines of higher lows broke last week, but then recovered.  The S&P 500 even rallied above the 10, 20 and 50 day moving averages for a strong finish to the week.

With the close on Friday finishing near the trend line of lower highs, I expect a (maybe brief) pullback to lower trend line of higher lows.  As volatile as this market has been, I don’t expect those lines to hold more than another week.  If they did, we’d have a very narrow trading range by next week and this market just doesn’t like small moves.  I see it breaking, but can only guess that the move will be lower with gas prices still high.  I don’t think Wall Street realizes the average worker is having a hard time paying these prices over $3.00 still.  $4.00 was crazy, but $3.00+ isn’t so easy for a lot of people.