During bull markets I always get asked about when it's going to stop. I don't get asked about stock market bubbles and unsustainable valuations during bear markets, that's for sure. Those environments come with other kinds of funny questions.
This morning I woke up to one of my college buddies telling me that tech valuations are too high and that this has to be a bubble.
Journalists ask me every day how this can possibly continue. "Too high", they say. "Too fast", they tell me. "Fed Printing", they claim. "It's only 5 stocks!!!"... I can't.
Anyway, maybe this is the top. Maybe we are about to crash. Maybe valuations are too high....
But there's no evidence at all that this is the top. New All-time highs are not characteristic of downtrends. They are things we see regularly in uptrends. In fact, new highs are perfectly normal, and should even be expected in this type of environment.
The opinions of my college friends don't matter. The opinion of the bond market? Yes, that matters. Currencies? Yup....
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
In last week's report, we outlined how the market was in an incredibly healthy state of order. We've been seeing rotation into SMIDS and Micro-Caps, strong breadth, and a sustained bid for Growth, particularly down the market-cap scale.
This week, we're harping on a similar theme.
The weight of the evidence, particularly from an intermediate and long-term time horizon, looks excellent.
But from a more short-term and tactical perspective, it would be healthy for many indexes down the market-cap scale to digest their gains. Many sector indexes and ratios are...
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
Last week, we outlined how the market is in a very healthy state of order.
Nothing has changed from that message. We continue to see strong demand for risk assets and healthy rotation down the market-cap scale.
Additionally, market internals and breadth continue to improve beneath the surface, supporting the recent leg higher for stocks, both domestically and abroad.
Many Growth-oriented groups that have underperformed recently closed at fresh highs this past week, suggesting these are areas we want to continue to lean on to express our bullish thesis.
Let's jump right into the report starting at the US index table.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
Last week, we mentioned we were no longer in a split market, but rather in an environment supported by strong internals and an aggressive appetite for risk assets.
This week, we're preaching much of the same.
We continue to see rotation down the market-cap scale, into Micro-Caps and SMIDS, confirming the strong underlying market internals.
Growth and sector leaders, such as Technology $XLK, Communications $XLC, and Consumer Discretionary $XLY are underperforming, but still holding important levels.
Rather than make premature bets on sustained outperformance from sector laggards like Financials, Industrials, and Energy, we...
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We've explained how we continue to see the weight of the evidence shifting in favor of the bulls with each passing week.
We can finally say we're no longer in a split market environment. Instead, we see a market supported by strong internals where the bias is clearly higher for equities and risk-assets alike.
After the prior week's resurgence from the Tech/Growth trade, as well as new highs from many of the major sectors and indexes, this week showed a strong rotation back into cyclical groups.
I know we've discussed the potential for some serious sector rotation before. But we haven't seen such a strong week from economically sensitive groups like this just yet.
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
Despite being in a split market environment, we've pointed out how the weight of the evidence continues to shift further and further in the direction of the bulls with each passing week.
This past week, we finally saw what appears to be the tipping point as stocks and risk-assets were all up generously. We've been waiting for the market to make up its mind from a risk-appetite perspective, as well as for the stock market to pick a direction after almost three months of sideways action.
Not only was the S&P up over 7% last week, but it's following through with a monster move today. The S&P is up about 3.5% as I write this.
But there's even more good news for investors... it looks as...
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @Haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
This week, we saw that trade unwind a bit as most risk-assets were lower on the week. We're going to need to see a lot more data come in to support a sustained rotation into these more cyclical areas as well as reverse some of these long-term relative trends.
So, after a big week of progress, we're right back to an increasingly bifurcated market environment.
Mark Dow has been a guest on this podcast more times than anyone else for a good reason. Selfishly I always enjoy chatting with him. His perspective is fascinating to me because he does such brilliant job of combining price behavior with sentiment analysis and the global macro intermarket backdrop.
Mark worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in charge of Emerging Markets in the early 90s before ultimately running money for a Global Macro Hedge Fund in New York City. So he has a lot of opinions on economics and politics, but he's great at not letting those things get in the way of his price behavior and sentiment analysis. He's figured out how to separate them but also use his expertise to his advantage. That's not any task.
I loved this conversation because we talked about how institutional investors are positioned coming into the U.S. election, how currencies and interest rates around the world are being affected, and in turn how they are affecting other asset classes. I ask him about Bitcoin and Gold and which one will win that battle. Of course, the US Dollar and Emerging Markets were part of the discussion (we can't help ourselves whenever we get...