If one were to simply observe the daily charts for $SPY or $QQQ while listening to the teevee, one would easily conclude the sky is falling. And that would be an easy conclusion to come to.
But when we take a step back from the noise and look elsewhere, the details under the hood are suggesting a different story. And that is giving me some confidence to fade the hysteria here.
Key Takeaway: Price volatility fueling sentiment reset. Indexes under pressure as the tide turns against their largest components. Positive breadth divergences lacking.
Higher rates are fueling strength in Energy and Financials - leadership from those sectors can be seen across market cap levels.
Our industry group heat map shows continued deterioration from large-cap groups and improvement from small-cap groups. Some 8% of large-cap groups made new 13-week highs last week vs 42% that made new 13-week lows. Among small-cap groups, it was 17% at new highs and only 13% at new lows.
There aren’t many coins breaking out to all-time highs right now, but AXS is one of them.
We just had to break the rules with this one – it’s currently trading at a tiny market cap of $750M, so it’s $250M shy of joining our Crypto universe. So keep in mind that this one is much smaller than what we typically deal with.
This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Infrastructure sector. Nifty Infra continues to display strength across different time frames. One of the stocks that stands out from this sector has been featured here.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July last year to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Energy is the clear leader in the commodity markets right now. Our equally-weighted energy index is up 13.76% over the trailing month and 6.58% in the last five days.
The emerging strength from this group is supported by a rising rate environment that could be just getting started.
So, crude oil to 100 dollars and natural gas to 9?
Maybe! But before we get ahead of ourselves, there are still plenty of mixed signals and divergences that need to be resolved.
One that stands out is the lack of confirming price action between economically sensitive commodities. Let’s take a look!
Here’s a chart of Crude Oil futures, Copper futures, and Copper Miners $COPX:
Index-level volatility picked up in September and by month-end the S&P 500 has experienced its first 5% drawdown in nearly a year. Beneath the surface, we’ve been seeing increasingly widespread and substantial pullbacks since early this year. More than 50% of NASDAQ stocks are more than 20% below their highs, and more than 20% are more than 50% below their highs. These percentages have been trending higher since February and reflect a market that has churned, corrected and seen a substantial amount of air come out of it since Q1. With the indexes themselves now catching down, Q4 could be when the average stock starts to get back in gear.