We look at a lot of intermarket relationships and try to analyze the same things, but from different perspectives. It’s all part of the weight of the evidence approach that we so often preach. Today we’re focusing in on the relative strength (or weakness) in Consumer Staples as a heads up for the next move in the US Stock Market.
Consumer Staples are funny bunch. Think about it like this: regardless of how bad the economy might get, as a society we’re still going to brush our teeth, wash our dishes, smoke cigarettes and drink beers. Those are Consumer Staples. They tend to be less volatile and underperform when stocks in general are going higher, but outperform when stocks are selling off, for the same reasons.
This chart here really shows this powerful relationship. Normally when we look at relative strength, we like to put the asset or sector in question as the numerator. But to really see the high positive correlation, we flipped the ratio below so the S&P500 is the numerator and Consumer Staples are the denominator. So if the chart at the bottom is going up, Staples are underperforming, and if it’s going down, Staples are outperforming. [Read more…]