Consumer Discretionaries have been a great indicator of market strength for a long time. This has been the best performing sector off the 2009 lows by a long shot, nearly doubling the performance of Tech, which has also been a monster. Discretionaries broke out to new highs in early 2012, well before the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. With this sector breaking out to new all-time highs last month, it's hard to be bearish stocks.
Last month we introduced the newly added Monthly Chartbook in a post where we discussed the trends and perspectives seen through a long-term lens. Our conclusions were that many of our price objectives for the Nifty Sectors and Indices were hit and that a neutral approach was best in many cases. In that type of environment we wanted to focus our long trades in areas showing relative strength like large-cap Financial Services, IT, and Consumers Goods, while focusing our short trades in areas that were showing relative weakness, like mid and small-cap Infrastructure, Realty, and Metals stocks.
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July's Strategy Session will be held on Wednesday, July 6th at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.
Next week I will be sending out our Q3 playbook. Email me if you're not already a Premium Member. There are so many interesting things happening right now that I think there will be plenty of opportunities to make money next quarter, despite it supposedly being a slower time of the year.
When months close at 4PM ET, I can't help myself but hit those monthly charts right away. I am very disciplined about never looking at them before the month is completed. You get into bad habits like that. So I look forward to the monthly candlesticks being done:
Continuing with a theme that emerged for us this week, we're taking recent volatility climbs as a gift to help us get through a typically slow summer trading period. Weeks like this one -- just ahead of a holiday week -- are the kinds that level-headed premium sellers wait for when putting on their "income trades."
One important part of the bull case for stocks in the US has been the leadership we've seen from small and mid-caps, growth areas of the market, and high beta stocks, however, we're starting to see some short-term deterioration in these leaders on an absolute and relative basis. Today I want to quickly look at the relationship between high beta stocks and their low volatility counterparts.
Over the last month we've spoken about weakness in small and mid-caps and the sectors we want to be involved in on both the long and short side. In healthy market environments we see sector rotation keep the broader market afloat as leaders correct through either time or price, however, we've not seen any of that over the last few months. The weakest sectors have not caught a bid as leaders correct, instead they've gotten even weaker. This is a problem.
In 2017 we saw an acceleration of the decade-long trend of growth outperforming value, and after further deterioration in this ratio to start the year, the weight of the evidence is suggesting a bottom may be in.
I feel like the recent minor skirmishes in U.S. stocks over the past week have been a nice little gift for premium sellers heading into what is a traditionally the slowest period of the calendar year. With the Independence Day holiday on the horizon, it's looking to me like a great time to start selling some premium in the indexes. So we've got a quick and easy one to set up before you light up your grills and sparklers.
Every time the stock market rallies over any significant period, we're bound to see the "most shorted stocks" chart come out of the woodwork with an ominous caption like "presented without comment" or "this is the top". Besides the fact that presented without comment is a comment in and of itself, the presenter very rarely tells us the methodology behind the chart's construction, leaving us with more questions than answers.
Last week, Tom Bruni penned a post titled Global ETF Carnage Continues, highlighting how ETFs representing stock markets around the world have been getting hurt by US Dollar strength. While he isn't yet calling a bottom, there was one particular Latin American ETF that was beginning to show signs of bottoming and it is a scenario he'd like to see replicated in more global ETFs to give him confidence the turn is coming.
The best way I know how to stay engaged in this possible turn is to have some skin in the game.
