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Ugh. That's all we can really say about the week. It started out on the right foot, squelching a budding downtrend from two weeks ago before it could get going in earnest. The response surrounding (I'm hesitant to describe it as a "response to") Wednesday's interest rate decision even started out bullishly. The last two days have been nothing but bearish though, pulling stocks back to where they were exactly two weeks ago as well as two months ago.

In other words, another fruitless week.

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It's official. Red-hot Cardinal Resources (CDNL) has secured some big-time funding, not to mention cemented an outstanding sales partner in place. More important to current and prospective CDNL shareholders, the stock has already perked up in the wake of several recent announcements from the company. It's today's news, however, that may well catapult a well-primed CDNL.

The press release in its entirety appears below. I'll sum it up for you here though - Cardinal Resources is garnering $7.5 million in exchange for 51% of the company. The investor is Chinese outfit Hangzhou Sky Valley Water Technology Co., Ltd.

If you've been following the CDNL saga at all, it's a name that should ring a bell. Hangzhou was the company that signed a letter of intent to become a major shareholder back on October 13th. It's also the company that purchased one of Cardinal Resources' Red Bird water-purification systems back on November 23rd... adding it was already looking to purchase two more systems.

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Welcome back from the weekend, one and all. We hope everybody had a good one.

The market was a little up and a lot down on Monday, but by the time the closing bell rang it managed to end the session at 2021.91, up 0.48%.

All in all the action was pretty predictable. Friday's drubbing was rough, and last week was a pretty big loser. Some stragglers probably felt like they had to dump shares while they still could. By mid-day, however, the bulls were already testing the waters again. That hammer-shaped bar today after a sizeable pullback says a reversal/bounce is in the works. Like we said, it's all pretty typical action.

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I'm willing to bet most of you are ready for the weekend after Friday's meltdown. Stocks were lackluster all week long, but between Wednesday's sizeable stumble and Friday's huge selloff, this past trading week was a bit painful for the bulls (though a blessing for the bears).

To answer your two key questions, yes, the S&P 500 broke under its major support level, but no, the NASDAQ Composite didn't. We'll look at both, just to make sure we have a firm grip on what's going on here.

The S&P 500's chart below shows us the index broke under the lower Bollinger band as well as below the 100-day moving average line (gray)... the last of potential support levels made by any moving average lines. The plunge also pulled the index below the November low around 2021, so we can't even hope there's a floor there.

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Good Thursday to you. Yes, the market was up today, but only a little, with the indices giving back most of their intraday gains by the time the closing bell rang.

To tell you the truth, the intraday pullback is more alarming than a small gain would have been on its own. By making a pretty nice intraday gain and then giving most of it up again, the bulls just proved to the bears they're not super-convicted here. Had we not made such a high and then given it up, at least the would-be bulls could have chalked it up to a lethargic day. Now we know the buyers aren't committed, which makes it tougher to get other buyers to commit in the foreseeable future.

Take a close look at our chart of the S&P 500 below to see what I mean. The S&P 500 rallied to as high as 2067.65, slightly eclipsing the 200-day moving average line (green), completely hurdling the 50-day average (purple), and threatening the 20-day average line (blue). By the time the closing bell rang though, the S&P 500 was back below all of them, closing at only 2052.23. The bulls just couldn't hang on to their gain (which lacked volume from the get-go... more on that in a second).