We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July 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.
There was a lot of movement across asset classes over the last week, but more importantly, the market gave us some key inflection points to trade against.
In this post, we're going to look at Precious Metals and review how we should be approaching them.
Do stock market crashes normally happen when investors are expecting one?
I'm pretty sure it's the opposite of that.
Well, this is the chart being passed around this week. We're looking at the United States Crash Confidence Index, where fewer than 15% of respondents think NO crash is going to happen.
So in other words, almost 90% of respondents think "a catastrophic stock market crash in the U.S., like that of October 28, 1929 or October 19, 1987, is probable in the next six months, including the case that a crash occurred in the other countries and spreads to the U. S."
Thanks to everyone for participating in this Week's Mystery Chart. Most of you were sellers but the chart was inverted, so you were actually buyers.
We'd be buying this chart too, so let's dive right in and see what it is and why we're all so bullish.
This week's chart was the Invesco Chinese Technology ETF $CQQQ.
In this post, we'll dig into the strongest Chinese technology stocks and outline some trade ideas as a way to express our bullish thesis.
We'll also discuss some intermarket implications of this ETF and its components.
We're going to take a close look at these Chinese tech giants and see if we can glean some insight into the internals of CQQQ in addition to other International Indexes.
First of all, the chart looks a good deal different than it did when we posted the Mystery Chart earlier this week.
They always make a big fuss about "Sell in May and Go Away", but rarely do you they tell you to "Remember to Buy in November". Or as my friend Jeff Hirsch, of the Stock Trader's Almanac, likes to put it, "Buy in October and Get Yourself Sober".
All these sayings derive from the fact that since 1950, every single dollar made in the Dow Jones Industrial Average has come between the months of November through April. In fact, had you bought the Dow on the first trading day in May every year since 1950 and sold on Halloween, you would actually have negative return (or close to it, anyway. I believe the past couple of years put it in the black).
Now, within the "Best 6 Months" of the year, you have an even sweeter spot: November - January.
The way I see it, if stocks couldn't fall during what is historically the worst time of the year, imagine how they'll do during a time where they're actually supposed to go up!
Here's how stocks did during the "Worst 6 months" of 2020:
I don't think there's any doubt that we'll be seeing a surge in healthcare spending in the coming months and years. And while that makes for a good story, the charts in the healthcare sector offer a more compelling narrative.
Breaking away from custom here, we'll be taking a shot in a laggard in this sector that offers us a pretty clear risk management level and an affordable opportunity for us to buy time for the catch up to commence.
When I was going through my charts this week, this is one of the ones that stood out the most. I see Biotechnology, on both an equally-weighted and cap-weighted basis, breaking out of major bases.
More specifically, if you look at the Cap-weighted Index Fund $IBB, we're talking about half a decade of no progress. It looks to me like this is all changing now:
Click on Charts to Zoom in
Look at Biotech relative to the rest of the stock market. Again, I'm seeing a half-decade long consolidation resolving higher:
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.