The S&P spent the first half of the day chipping away at yesterday's 3% gain. The lunch-hour intraday low was off nearly 1%. But the afternoon saw the buyers gradually upping the bid, and the index closed the day with a small gain of 0.19%. Year-to-date the S&P 500 is down only 1.11%, although it's still 8.79% below the April 29th interim high. There are now six trading days left in 2011. Personally, I'll be surprised if this benchmark index ends the year in the red. And if Santa has some energy left after his weekend delivery of toys (and a few lumps of coal) we may yet see a new interim high in 2011.
From an intermediate perspective, the index is 83.8% above the March 2009 closing low and 20.5% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.
Below are two charts of the index, with and without the 50 and 200-day moving averages.