The stock market turned ugly this morning after an index from the windy city reported that business conditions were back in the red. An earlier report indicating that the labor market was worse than forecasts in September had laid the groundwork for the sell-off. Within a few minutes all three indexes fell more than 1%, and by 11:30 the S&P 500 was down 0.77% to 1,052, the Dow was trading 0.77% lower to 9,671, while the Nasdaq was down 0.66% to 2,109.

However, shortly thereafter commodities prices began to rally and stocks bounced off a key technical support level, recovering almost all of the intraday losses. …(read more)