One of the topics I spoke about during my Chart Summit presentation on breadth last month was the relative performance of Equally-Weighted versus Cap-Weighted Indexes.
I always hear that the market cannot go higher on an absolute basis if the Equally-Weighted S&P 500 is underperforming the Cap-Weighted.
It's been about three weeks since I wrote this post looking at breadth across various Equity markets since January 2018.
JC wrote a post today about "The Cards We've Been Dealt" which references some of these stats, so I wanted to update some of them and highlight another way we use them to measure breadth.
We've been erring on the long side of stocks for the last 6 weeks, taking trades where the reward/risk is heavily skewed in our favor, but are still seeing mixed evidence regarding the market's ability to make new highs in the short-term.
The Equally-Weighted Semiconductor Index recently made new all-time highs, while the cap-weighted sits a few below its 2018 highs. What's next for Semis? That's what I hope to answer in this post.
Yesterday during our Members-Only Conference Call we discussed a lot of themes and trade ideas, but I wanted to highlight two charts that remain an issue for our bullish Equities thesis.
My presentation at Chart Summit 2019 focused on market breadth and how we like to keep our process of looking at the subject pretty simple.
While that presentation covered a number of our methods of measuring the market's internals, in this post I want to share some stats we pulled this weekend that help provide some valuable context around the market's rally from the December 24th lows.
The table below outlines the major US Indexes we cover with performance stats from important inflection points: The January 2018 highs, the September 2018 peak, and the December 24th low.
We also have some additional stats listed like percentage below 52-week high and above 52-week low, days since those events occurred, whether the daily RSI reading is in a bullish or bearish range, and whether prices are above their 200-day moving average.
The columns we want to pay attention to for now are the first three.
In our "Free Chart of The Week" we posed the question whether or not we've seen the end of the Mid/Small-Cap decline and presented some compelling breadth and momentum data.
This post is going to outline all of the "big picture" evidence that's currently available and explain why we think the foundation has been laid for stocks to carve out a long-term bottom.
The noisemakers love to talk to you about something they like to call FANG, or FAANG or FAAMG. I think they change it each time, depending on which narrative their trying to pass along to the unaware. They're here to make noise, we're only here to make money. See the difference?
What you will hear every day, if you choose to subject yourself to their crap, is that Google and Amazon are only up 6% this year. What you won't hear is that the Equally-weighted Technology Index just broke out to new all-time highs relative to the traditional Market Cap-Weighted Technology Index.
When it comes to market breadth, the Advance-Decline line is definitely one of our go-to's. This indicator calculates the net advancers. In other words, the number of advancing stocks less the number of declining stocks. This cumulative measure goes up and down over time, similar to the market indexes themselves.
Something to keep in mind is the fact that we use the Common Stocks Only A-D Line because there are other vehicles that trade on the NYSE, like closed-end funds for example. If we're analyzing the stock market, let's stick to just stocks in our indicators.
As part of my preparation for my Chart Summit presentation on market breadth, I'm looking at a lot of charts this week. In this post I'll share a bunch of them to provide some perspective on where US markets currently sit from a participation perspective.
In this post I want to share two charts from the weekend update of our Market Internals workbook, both of which confirm the continued deterioration in breadth as US Stocks make new lows.
