Wow, what a day !

It was such a key battlefield day because the 200-Day simple moving average was at stake today. This is such an important level for market technicians because almost everybody keeps tabs on this particular moving average. It's the most recognised long-term trend indicator: fund managers refer to it, academic papers have been written about it, and investment decisions are made based on whether we are above or below it.

Today, we kept our head above water. The market has been looking a bit sick all week until we got to the point where we were seriously challenging this key level. Yesterday we bounced off it. Today, the bears had another run at it from the get-go during the opening trading session.

We closed the day at the 50-Day SMA, which another level commonly watched by market technicians. It's less important than the 200-Day SMA, but a good indicator of short-to-medium term trend.

If we drill into the intraday chart, we can see how the market gapped at the open to dip below the all important 200-Day SMA. This didn't last long as the index recovered to keep its head above water, but bounced around to retest that level.

After a few hours of indecision, we finally got some strength in the afternoon to drive the index higher. At the time of posting this, it's too early to get volume figures for the S&P 500 index from my broking platform, but I'm assuming buyers stepped in on hopefully greater volume to push the index higher. If there isn't an uptick in volume, it usually means it's the sellers who began to exhaust first. There's a couple of strong green candles in the afternoon.

Today ended up being a good day for the longs. The unfortunate thing is we're in a choppy, battlefield market and any trend follow through has been weak of late. There's relief we closed above the 200-Day SMA, but tomorrow is a brand new day. The market has not been very accommodative to trend traders.