If you are a casual observer of the market then your takeaway was that today was just a boring, essentially flat day. After all the Dow only closed up 5 points right?
What you may have missed was that the Dow was down 277 points at one point, the other indexes were all getting crushed too. However at around 12:30 the market started a slow and steady recovery that landed all the indexes green with the small exception of the Russell which ended marginally lower.
The 10 minute chart below shows you today’s action.