From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.
What’s with all this talk about weak breadth lately?
A lot of market participants have been pointing out the divergences or lower highs in popular breadth indicators such as the percent of S&P 500 stocks at new 52-week highs or the percent above their 200-day moving average.
In many cases, these actually aren’t divergences at all as the S&P is yet to make a new year-to-date high itself.
Just like we look at different breadth indicators to identify market tops than the ones we look at to signal bottoms, we should use different items in our breadth toolkit depending on the market environment we’re in.
Using the current rally as an example, it makes little sense to give weight to the percent of stocks making new 52-week highs considering most indexes and sectors haven’t been able to achieve the same.
Although, there are other metrics like the percent of stocks making new short-term highs and the percent hitting overbought momentum readings that can give us a lot of information about market internals right now. In this post, we’ll dive into these charts to see what they’re currently telling us.