We are not seeing any evidence of a bottom for stocks, yet. In these sorts of scenarios we want to see improvements in market breadth and/or bullish momentum divergences start to pile up. We're not seeing any of either.
In times like this, where many stocks, indexes and sectors, are in what we call "no-man's land", it helps to find non-correlated assets to analyze and perhaps invest in.
One thing that does NOT move up and down with the US Stock Market is Natural Gas. Evidence of this lack of correlation can be seen throughout 2019, for example, as Natty Gas got crushed while US Stocks soared.
We had a few buyers but most of you were selling at this logical level of interest or exercising patience to see how prices react here. A few responses also pointed out that this likely isn't the best time to enter on the long side but are anticipating an eventual breakout and would be buyers if and when we get it.
This is the same camp we'd fall into and we provide details why in the original Mystery Chart post. With that as our backdrop, let's look at the chart.
There's been an ag-gravating pattern of behavior torturing bulls in the Agricultural Commodity space, so this educational piece will highlight the conditions that got us here and also outline a new trade idea.
In last week's Chart of the Week, we wrote about our bullish outlook on Gold and followed it up with a deep dive on the entire Precious Metals space, which included a number of trade ideas to express our thesis. This week, we have a table that helps provide a different perspective on its recent price action but arrives at the same bullish conclusion.
The shiny metal has gotten a lot of attention lately as it currently sits around its highest level in seven years.
After about a 9% surge off of this month's lows, we'd expect prices to consolidate in the near-term. But after that, we're betting on new all-time highs for Gold in the coming quarters as long as prices are above last year's highs near 1,560. Here's how we see it.
We had a lot of "do nothing" responses this week, many of which were caveated with the fact that the structural trend is lower, thus anticipating an eventual breakdown but waiting for more data to come in to confirm it first.
We also had a number of responses with conviction to buy the test of support and plenty of others who wanted to sell into it or "look to get short." The majority took a neutral approach, preferring to see how prices react at this key level of interest before choosing a directional bias.
I think that is the most prudent thing to do in this situation as well, so with that as our backdrop let’s take a look at this week’s chart.
We've been fading gold since September for a variety of reasons, but primarily due to the overwhelming amount of selling being done by Commercial Hedgers.
While many of those conditions still exist our risk management for this thesis has always been Gold closing above 1,600.
This week we're getting that, so let's take a look at what's next and how we're taking advantage of it.
Over the past month, Bonds are up a bunch as the collapse in Interest Rates has resumed. We jumped on board this bond trade last month and so far it's working.
Meanwhile, a majority of U.S. stocks are actually down over the past month. While the S&P500, Dow Industrials and Nasdaq100 have gone on to make new highs, the NYSE Advance-Decline line (stocks only) did not, Small-caps did not, Dow Transports did not, and a majority of individual stocks did not. It's only a minority of names doing the work, particularly large-cap stocks and some higher dividend paying areas like REITs and Utilities.
When you run the numbers, most stocks in the U.S. are down over the past month, with negative average and median returns for the Russell3000 components. It's the bonds that are up and I think they're just getting started.