Earlier today we saw that financials and housing stocks were among the strongest. With less than an hour to go in the session, that is the still the case. To get a feel for what is going on under the surface I sorted my list of financial names to see which ones were the strongest. At the top of my list were Hartford Financial Services (HIG), Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co, E-Trade Financial Corp (ETFC), and Citigroup Inc (C). Here are the intraday charts...

Charts Courtesy of Thomson Financial

Looking at the intraday charts can give us a feel for how the buying has come in. In the case of Goldman, which reported earnings this morning, the buying has been fairly stable. The stock more or less rallied steadily into the Fed announcement with only a small pause, then saw more buying demand come right back in. In the case of JPM and C we see a more pronounced lull ahead of the Fed and then a spike in buying.

The outlier here though is E-Trade Financial Corp. That stock, which I featured last week, saw an early spike and has yet to see buyers really come back in. The shares are still showing a gain of 11% on the day, but that is still below the best levels of the session.

The two strongest stocks from the group are Hartford Financial Services and Morgan Stanley. Each is up 20% and each has been hit hard this year. Heading into today, shares of HIG were showing a year-to-date loss of 84% while shares MS were down 74%. In other words, we seem to be seeing money flow into the beaten up names. If this is starting to sound familiar, it is because we saw a similar pattern play out last month as financial stocks rallied off the November lows.