This move in $IYR (iShares US Real Estate ETF) is incredible, and we might go higher from here still. But I'm willing to bet a mild retracement will soon be at hand -- or at the very least we'll see a pause.
As the calendar turns to February, it is time to review our handful of open positions with Feb options that are nearing expiration and might require some attention.
Short-term strength in Precious Metals continues, so I want to do an in-depth analysis of the space like I did last August to see if we're now entering "The Golden Age of Precious Metals".
One chart that I think sums up how I feel about Precious Metals is an equally-weighted index of Gold, Silver, Platinum, and Palladium. While no longer in a long-term downtrend, it's not in an uptrend either. All that can be said is that it's testing the top of a multi-year range. Not all that exciting.
Coming into the year, the most important chart I was watching was the US Dollar. As far as risk appetite was concerned, I felt the Dollar would be a great tell. The way I saw it, the Dollar rallied throughout 2018 to achieve its upside objective and then broke the uptrend line from those former lows. If we were to just rip through those key levels without at least some kind of pause or consolidation, it would most likely be because of a tremendous flight to safety. Stocks would probably be doing poorly under those conditions.
Sticking with a theme we started the week with, if the market is poised for higher prices, they will likely be led by the Medical Devices space. Putting our money where our mouths are, we're taking a shot that will be a home run if it plays out, while offering us room to be wrong without losing too much.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and eliminate the x and y-axes and and all labels eliminated to minimize bias. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. It can even be inverted or a custom index.
The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead to think about what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
For me, price is the most important technical indicator. Everything after that is just a supplement to actual price behavior. In that group of supplements is Momentum. My oscillator of choice is the RSI, or the "Relative Strength Index". I use this indicator in a variety of ways, but today I wanted to show you an easy trick to quickly identify whether momentum is in a bullish range or a bearish range:
What's wrong with taking the loss, learning to live with it, and then moving on?
In October, Dr. Brett Steenbarger shared some of his thoughts with us on visualizing yourself taking the loss, before even entering into an investment. Already going through that "pain" in your head makes the loss easier to accept in the future if/when we are wrong.
If the worst is over for the stock market, then definitely one of the areas we want to be getting long is the medical devices sector. There are a lot of stocks here that have shown relative strength and are at or near all-time highs. If US stocks go higher from here, this sector will definitely lead the way.
You know what is not a characteristic of a downtrend? All-time highs!
Friday afternoon, the Medical Equipment Index went out at new all-time weekly closing highs relative to the S&P500. We look to relative strength as a leading or coincident indicator for stocks. This sector's behavior is no different.
There is a reason why Medical Equipment stocks look like Tech stocks and not the rest of Healthcare. They're essentially tech stocks trapped in the body of a healthcare stock. Although they are indeed in the Healthcare space, we need to recognize how they behave, the relative strength vs their peers and then treat them as their own group.
In case you missed it, Medical Equipment stocks went out yesterday at their highest weekly close relative to the S&P500 EVER. This is not evidence of a downtrend or any kind of weakness. Quite the opposite in fact:
