I hope you enjoyed the Fourth of July fireworks on Sunday, because there might not be much to celebrate on Wall Street this week.

Last week we warned that if most of the impending economic releases were negative, the market would likely fall worse than it did the week before.  And that’s what happened.  In fact, it dropped approximately twice as much as the week before. (It doesn’t feel so good to be right.)

We began the month of June with the S&P 500 at 1089. Today, it closed at 1074, leaving just two more days to gain the lost ground and turn the month positive.  The Summer Solstice on June 21 marked the high point for the month, with an intraday high of 1131 and its sights set on the 50-day moving average above. What a difference a week makes.

Last week was a good week for the market from a technical standpoint, with the S&P 500 moving ahead about 2% and pushing through two important layers of resistance.  It broke above its 200-day moving average, which had been providing stiff resistance for weeks, and also broke through even stronger resistance at the 1114 level.

Here in Santa Barbara, where Sabrient is headquartered, "June Gloom" is that time of year when the marine layer and murky fog last until about noon every day before the sun finally burns its way through. The market seems to be enveloped in a similar gloom, and at this point we don't know when the sun might come out to chase it away.

We enter a new month this week mired in a persistent global malaise.  The weekend increase in Israeli-Palestinian tension doesn’t help, nor does the continued inability of BP to deal with the largest oil spill in history.  Economic news this morning was positive but without sufficient importance to do much more than soften the opening gap down.

Unfortunately, the dismal attitude we conveyed last week, was fulfilled with one of the worst weeks the market has had in some time.  The S&P 500 has fallen almost 15% from its April highs and is now below all of its moving averages, including the 200-day moving average.

It was a wild ride last week and perhaps the worst week the markets have seen since we began publishing this newsletter in 2004.  But today the bulls stampeded and the shorts ran for cover as the S&P 500 gained +4.4% for the day!

This week should be another interesting one, but it’s hard to say whether it can match the market’s behavior last week when it donned rose-colored glasses to view four days of mixed economic data.

It has been a week of sparse market-moving news, but what news there was continued to be generally supportive of the market’s slow growth recovery. Remarkably, volatility continues to be very low. Unlike the 6 to 10% gyrations (in both directions) of late 2008 and early 2009, we’ve seen very few days this year when the market has moved more than 1% in either direction.