Wall Street erases sharp declines to close in the green

• Wall Street today was another roller coaster, plagued by mixed sentiment over global growth, trade and domestic politics on US soil. 
• The partial government shutdown hangs over like a dark cloud on rallies and has hampered the data transparency. 

However, we did get weekly jobless claims data, but no November data on new home sales which were yet again delayed. For jobs, the first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell by 1,000 to 216,000 in the week ended Dec. 22. The Conference Board said its consumer-confidence index dropped to 128.1 this month from a revised 136.4 in November. This followed MasterCard's data on shoppers that delivered the strongest holiday sales increase for U.S. retailers in six years. Total U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles, rose 5.1% between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 from a year earlier, according to Mastercard. 

Benchmarks erase losses

As for the benchmark's performance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.14%  was up 96 points, or 0.4%, at 22,975, after dropping as much as 611 points at its session low. The S&P 500 SPX, +0.86% also erased a sharp decline to rise 4 points, or 0.2%<,to 2,472. The Nasdaq Composite COMP, +0.38%  trimmed a loss of more than 3% and was down 10 points, or 0.2%, at 6,544.

DXY levels

Meanwhile, the index has made an impression on the 38.2% Fibo retracement of the Dec decline from 26072 and bulls can target the 50% retracement Fibo of 23765 with daily RSI in their favour and a bullish downside long shadow on Thursday’s closing candlestick, showing the bulls are in control in the eleventh hour on Thursday’s US session, penetrating th 50-4hr SMA.

• Support levels: 22453 21924 21013
• Resistance levels: 23364 23893 24804