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.
Some people actually think this world is just filled with rainbows and butterflies and stocks are always supposed to go up. I never understood that ignorance. Sometimes stocks go up, sometimes they go down and sometimes they go sideways for a while. It will take you less than 5 minutes of market history research to understand this very simple fact.
Of those 3, I would argue we are in the 'sideways for a while' category in U.S. Stocks, particularly the S&P500.
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.
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.
Over the last three weeks Sun Pharmaceuticals has been doing its best Deutsche Bank impression, losing roughly a third of its value and trading at levels not seen since March 2013.
As the largest component of the Nifty Pharmaceuticals Index this performance has been a major drag on the index, however, equally-weighted charts can offer us a much better read of the sector's health.
We've been looking for breadth and momentum divergences to be confirmed both in the US and globally to mark the start of "the bottom" in equities as an asset class, so today I want to highlight the breadth of one sector which provides perspective on the current market environment.
Momentum and breadth diverged slightly in the major indices and many global markets, leading to a short-term bounce that's been sold into so far. Today I want to look at sector breadth to highlight the extent of the weakness under the surface and outline what we're watching for if/when prices retest their late October, and potentially Q1 lows.
Over the weekend I ran the performance metrics of the Russell 3000's Sectors and Industries to get some perspective on where the leadership is since the S&P 500's high on October 3rd and year-to-date. In this post I just want to share this table and talk about some of the themes I see.
For our subscribers I've discussed what we need to be seeing in terms of market breadth before stepping in and trading stocks in India on the long side (here, here, here, and here) and today's action suggests we may be on our way to getting that opportunity in the next week or two.
This past weekend we wrote updates for our US and India subscribers, discussing stock market breadth around the globe. When I do these types of updates, we often get asked why we look at international markets both in their local currency terms AND as US-listed ETFs. Why not one or the other? In this quick post we'll walk through our thought process behind it.
