We don't have to make things complicated guys. We don't get paid to tell stories and make up reasons for why the market is moving during the day. We are market participants. We are the 99.99% of people in the world who are just here to try and make a profit. We don't have to put together a pitch, or a sexy headline, or ask our boss for permission to do things. We just want to make a buck when the market moves. That's it.
So while all those people out there pretending to be mother goose are making up stories about the fed and inflation and all sorts of noise, we prefer to focus on price, which is literally the only thing that will ever pay anyone in this business. Today we are looking at the chart that has suggested since June that selling Treasury Bonds was the right move, and therefore interest rates would rise.
Sometimes Standard & Poors, Dow Jones, MSCI and FTSE simply don't do the trick. If we want to analyze a specific group of stocks and the big boys haven't created an index with what we want, what then? Through technology, we can just build our own. There's nothing stopping us. Now, we're not just going to create random indexes so we can complete with them in their space. The point here is to build something if and when it is necessary. Will it help us throughout our process or just create unnecessary noise? That is the big question.
With all of the major U.S. Stock Market Indexes hitting all-time highs, I think it’s important to see if the bond market is telling a similar story. Are bonds confirming the risk appetite we’re seeing towards stocks or is there a divergence? Based on my work, bonds suggest there is plenty of risk appetite out there globally and therefore stocks should continue higher.
One of the biggest reasons why I got so bullish towards U.S. Stocks in early July was because of the breakout in Technology out of a multi-year range. This sector represents over 20% of the S&P500, so the way I see it, if the largest sector in America is breaking out of a range to new 52-week highs, it's hard to be bearish. Although there were many other factors that have kept us bullish over the past few months, Technology has definitely been a big one.
Now, as sexy as this breakout in Technology stock prices might have been, it's another breakout in Technology last week that really gets me optimistic:
My favorite event of the year is coming very soon! This is a weekend that I, along with many of my friends, look forward to every Fall. The island of Coronado is a special place that has brought a lot of people together and has helped launch incredibly successful businesses. In other cases, this event along with networking opportunities at the Del Coronado Hotel has helped grow many companies with new partnerships and business ideas. If there is one common denominator for all 5 Stocktoberfests since 2012, it's that. Guys like Josh Brown, Ryan Detrick, myself and many others are always happy to share our success stories post-Coronado Island visits. I'm certain that this year will be no different.
Every week I go sector by sector and start my analysis from scratch on both weekly and daily timeframes. This provides structural perspective to get a bigger picture outlook and then I work my way down to daily timeframes for execution and risk management purposes. This is what we call a top/down approach. Along the way, I also want to see how each sector is performing relative to the rest of the market. This relative strength analysis is usually a 'heads up' for what is to come on a more absolute basis.
Today, I want to focus on one of the most important sectors in the US Stock market and why the relative underperformance is something we want to keep on our radar.
This week I dropped by the News Corp building to chat with Liz Claman on Fox Business. Liz simply wanted to know what we want to be buying and what we want to be selling. I think we need to be watching last year's highs in both the S&P500 and Russell3000. If prices are above those levels, it's hard to be bearish. When you ask what will drive price higher, I'm in the camp that mega-cap tech, which represents over 20% of the S&P500, will continue to be a tailwind for markets.
This morning I was over at the Nasdaq in Times Square chatting with Amber Kanwar on BNN. We discussed why I think U.S. Stocks continue to rally and which key sectors will drive prices higher. Within each of these very important sectors, there are large-cap stocks leading the way for them. I think we're closer to the beginning than the end of this move higher in the S&P500 and these other important sectors. At the end we touch on why extremes in sentiment could be the catalyst to send British Pounds even higher.
We want to look at the broad market and treat every single stock market index as a tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle. The Dow Jones Transportation Average has been a great leading indicator for stocks as an asset class over the past few years and we continue to want to treat it that way. Remember, the Transports peaked at the end of 2014, 6 months before the S&P500 and this year the Dow Transports bottomed out in January, well before the S&P500 and the other major indexes bottomed out in February. So now what?
When you talk about the most important sectors in the stock market, financials certainly have to be near the top of the list. Technology is the largest sector in the S&P500 by market capitalization, but bull markets need participation out of Financials. For argument sake, we'll chalk these up as the two most important sectors in the market together representing over a third of the entire S&P500. Today, we'll focus on the Financials and why I think they are now breaking out.
