The stock market is trading much lower today, and the NASDAQ is leading the chargeto the downside. In a market that has become much more jittery over the past week, the technology stocks have been the biggest disappointment. No doubt the expectations were high for them coming into this earnings season, and for the most part they have failed to meet those high expectations. Today the major technology names that disappointed on the corporate earnings front were Motorola and Qualcomm. Both of these companies are in the mobile handset market and both had a pretty bleak outlook. Qualcomm missed their revenue number for this quarter, and is getting crushed by about 13% today.

Apple shares are also trading lower by about 4% on big volume today as the iPad has received some less than stellar reviews from some major names. In fact, a full article of the iPad flawshas circulated today. The market is starting to wonder if the release of the iPad is a little bit less of a boost to Apple than they initially thought.

Maybe investors just had hopes that were simply too high for the tech sector, but the NASDAQ is definitely starting to correct itself, losing 4% in the last 5 days. The overall market continues to be pulled down by uncertainty in Washington as well as around the world. There is no doubt that the market hates uncertainty, and the last few days is a great example of that. Right now investors are looking to find a clearer picture of what may be in the offing for the economy as well as the market. As I have said numerous times before the biggest deal right now is making sure the jobs picture improves so that the consumer gets healthier. It doesn’t have to be a perfect outlook to help the market right now, but we do need to get some clarity.

The worry for the bulls was that with one or two big name earnings that were disappointing there could be a pretty large setback in the stock market. It didn’t take very long for that to happen. In fact it was this morning, on the first week of earning season. JP Morgan Chase reported earnings that beat analyst estimates, but the outlook for the bank and the industry as a whole didn’t exactly leave investors full of cheer.

The earnings beat was called one of “low-quality” by analyst David Trone. Fixed-income was worse than expected, revenue was on the light side, and probably most concerning of all there were no signs of traditional banking turning around in any major way. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, tried to hint at the fact business might get better in the second half of 2010, but he had no hard data or evidence that this will be the case. JP Morgan CFO Michael Cavanagh was asked about the banking business outlook for this year and he responded simply by saying two words “cautious outlook.” Cautious outlooks are completely understandable, but that certainly isn’t what the market or investors were hoping for from this banking bellwether.

Since JP Morgan has actually done better on the whole than most in the financial industry it is fair to say that expectations for earnings for the entire banking industry probably went down quite a bit on today’s news. Needless to say banking stocks are being hit pretty hard today, and it has definitely spread to the entire market, where the Dow is down by more than 100 points on the day.

Earnings season has a long way to go, but today is an example of the possible bumps in the road for the bulls as we continue to look for signs of a full economic recovery.