Mike Hurley has been an inspiration to me for many years. When it comes to market breadth, this is the guy. He'll tell you he learned it from his predecessors and how he's standing on the shoulders of giants and all those things he discusses in this episode, but for me personally, he's been a great influence for sure. Many of you know how seriously I take my breadth work and how valuable it has been to so many of us for many years. It's people like Mike and others who have helped my process evolve to where it is today.
Today JC discussed our March playbook for Members and outlined some areas we'd be looking for a bounce with well-defined risk and others that we want to be completely avoiding.
I wanted to share a few breadth measures to provide context around the recent decline and see if they offer any clues around what's next.
The risks associated with owning stocks are currently elevated.
There are a lot of things I can say, levels I can point out, possible outcomes I can walk you through, all those things. But the one common denominator between all of those is that the risk in owning stocks is currently higher than it normally is.
This is an important time to remember your original investment objectives, time horizon and risk parameters. Before buying a stock, or entering any investment for that matter, these 3 questions need to be answered. I can't answer them for you. But what I can do is show you what we're seeing from an intermediate-term horizon.
Our goals here are to make money this quarter. We care about the coming weeks and months. It doesn't matter to us what the market does next year, and it doesn't matter what it does today. Weeks and Months. That's our focus.
The strongest Equity market in the world has been the US, however, last week prices started to confirm the weakness we were seeing under the surface since January. Today we wrote a brief piece on US market breadth which reinforces our view that defense remains the name of the game.
This follow-up is to make the point that if the strongest market in the world is catching down to weakness in the rest of the world, then India and other countries that have underperformed are likely to continue struggling in the near-term.
In fact, the breadth divergences we highlighted in the US are also playing out in India.
We've made it clear over the last few weeks that we don't want to be long stocks given current conditions and think there's downside risk from a short-term perspective, despite the structural picture remaining largely unscathed.
Given last week's slight downside follow-through in US Stocks, I wanted to share two breadth charts from our Market Internals Chartbook that summarizes current conditions well.
Unfortunately, with the last week or two of action, we've seen an expansion of stocks participating to the downside which suggests this near-term weakness could continue for the rest of the fourth quarter. Rather than the weakest stocks catching up to the leaders, the leaders are now catching down to the weakest names.
There is a lot going on in the market right now, not just in the U.S. but globally. The intermarket relationships between Bonds, Gold and the US Dollar are having a major impact on equities.
January is a month that gives us a lot more information than most other months throughout the year. We have the data now that we can use to help us identify primary trends.
Volatility is picking up. Daily swings are getting larger. I’ve seen this story before.
We discuss all of this and a lot more.
This is the video recording of the February 2020 Conference Call.
*NOTE: This Post and Video was originally intended for Premium Members of Allstarcharts Only. But due to the circumstances, we have unlocked it for everyone to watch and download the slides. We feel this can be used for educational purposes moving forward. Thank you for understanding.
I had a great day in New York City Wednesday. Good meetings, good eats and good people.
BNN Bloomberg was nice enough to invite me on their network to talk charts.
Catherine and I discussed some of my favorite sectors and industry groups. We went over the macro picture and beginning of this new bull market for stocks.
Most importantly, in my opinion, we went over what it would take for us to get more defensive, at least in the near term.
As we head into 2020, we start from scratch with our Q4 playbook and outline our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit in the quarter (and year) ahead.
Part 1 of this playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates.
Part 2 of this playbook will delve deeper into Indian Equities, going sector by sector to identify the trends that matter.
Part 3 of this playbook will outline the individual stocks we want to be buying and selling within the context of today's environment.
As we head into 2020, we start from scratch with our Q4 playbook and outline our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit in the quarter (and year) ahead.
Part 1 of this playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates.
Part 2 of this playbook will delve deeper into Indian Equities, going sector by sector to identify the trends that matter.
Part 3 of this playbook will outline the individual stocks we want to be buying and selling within the context of today's environment.
As we head into 2020, we start from scratch with our Q4 playbook and outline our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit in the quarter (and year) ahead.
Part 1 of this playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates.
Part 2 of this playbook will delve deeper into Indian Equities, going sector by sector to identify the trends that matter.
Part 3 of this playbook will outline the individual stocks we want to be buying and selling within the context of today's environment.
