The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index may decline as much as 9.9 percent from its current level before resuming its two-year-old advance, according to Bank of America Corp. The S&P 500’s fall below support at 1,270 last week broke the “uptrend” that has been in place since the middle of last year, Mary Ann Bartels, Bank of America’s New York-based head of technical market analysis, said in a note yesterday. The gauge closed at 1,256.88 on March 16 and rose three straight days since then, gaining 1.5 percent to 1,298.38 yesterday. “The cyclical bull market since the March 2009 low is intact,” Bartels said, “but a test of the recent low of 1,249 and possibly 1,220 to 1,170 cannot be ruled out.” She said her estimate for the S&P 500 remains 1,400. The S&P 500 has risen as much as 99 percent from its March 9, 2009, low as corporate earnings beat expectations, the Federal Reserve bought Treasuries to stimulate growth and economic data improved. The benchmark index for U.S. stocks declined 6.4 percent from Feb. 18 through March 16 as violence in the Middle East and northern Africa threatened to drive up energy prices and an earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused chaos in the world’s third-largest economy. Technical analysts study charts of trading patterns and prices to predict changes in a security, commodity, currency or index. To contact the reporter on this story: Joanna Ossinger in New York at jossinger@bloomberg.net. To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net.

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