US equities had a fair amount of economic news to digest Wednesday morning. The ADP employment report was worse than expected, 154K new nonfarm private jobs was below forecasts and the second lowest number in 41 months. And the trade deficit was a bit worse the expected. But bad news is good news.
The S&P 500 opened at its intraday low and rallied to its morning high, shortly after the release of the massively strong September ISM Non-Manufacturing report. At least for the next few minutes, good news triggered some selling.
The 500 stuttered in apparent confusion for about 45 minutes before resuming its diffident trend higher. It hit its 0.63% intraday high at the threshold of the final hour of trading and closed the session with a trimmed gain of 0.43%.
The yield on the 10-year note closed at 1.72%, a 15-session closing high.
Here is a snapshot of past five sessions in the S&P 500.
Here is daily chart of the index. Volume ticked up slightly on today's advance.
A Perspective on Drawdowns
Here's a snapshot of selloffs since the 2009 trough.
Here is a more conventional log-scale chart with drawdowns highlighted.
Here is a linear scale version of the same chart with the 50- and 200-day moving averages.
A Perspective on Volatility
For a sense of the correlation between the closing price and intraday volatility, the chart below overlays the S&P 500 since 2007 with the intraday price range. We've also included a 20-day moving average to help identify trends in volatility.