Chart Book | Chart of the day: Russell index under a cloud

Great excitement over the better-than-expected US non-farm payroll data on Friday and that the S&P 500 and Dow Industrials are back up at record highs. But pity the poor Russell 2000 index which, like most other more pedestrian markets, has recovered only half of August's slump. In fact, it is pretty much at the point it started off last year, helped last week by Ichimoku cloud support. Nevertheless, the technical outlook is not rosy while below horizontal resistance at 1,212, which also happens to be a Fibonacci 61 per cent retracement resistance level. While below here the risk of a retest of the bottom of the cloud remains, a break below it targets horizontal support at 1,080.