S&P 500 is showing signs of institutional selling: Sell Imbalance reaches -$1.2 billion
Following the Big Money in S&P 500 Stocks
So far in trading today, the S&P 500 ETF is down 2.0%. SPY stock last traded at $555.78. Large volume bursts in S&P 500 stocks reached 37.6 million shares worth a total of $4.9 billion in transactions. There was notable buy pressure in the Energy and Utilities sectors. Overall, sell volume pressure surpassed buy volume pressure by a 1.7 to 1 ratio. There were 87 stocks that had more buy pressure on balance, and 133 stocks that had more sell pressure from large institutions. As a whole, there was a net negative -$1.2 billion in dollar volume trades. A greater amount of the trading volume occurred on lit exchanges, at 57.6%, compared with 42.4% being transacted in the dark pool. To learn more about large volume trades, check out our help section.
Daily Chart: Large Volume Bursts Over Time
As you can see from the chart below, the most recent cumulative sell imbalance of -$1.2 billion occurred at 1:45 PM. This also represented the largest sell imbalance for the day. The largest spike in imbalance came between 10:00 AM and 10:15 AM when the sell pressure surpassed the buy pressure by a 3.4 to 1 ratio.
Flow by Sector
Consumer Discretionary had the highest amount of dollar volume bursts of all the SPDR sectors, with sell dollar volume exceeding buy dollar volume by $339.1 million. 8 of the Consumer Discretionary stocks had positive dollar balance, versus 18 that were net negative.
Individual Stocks
WBD stock had the single biggest volume burst activity of all the S&P 500 stocks. Buy volume bursts outpaced sell volume by 1.5 million shares. As of this afternoon, the average purchase price on buy volume was $10.88. Despite the buy pressure, the stock has dropped $0.59 on the day.
