This is the question I often ask myself. In which direction is there the most risk? Are we better off looking for stocks to buy or looking for stocks to sell? There is no need to make this complicated. Where are the probabilities of success skewed in our favor?
You're well aware by now that I spend a lot of time looking through charts in the U.S. and around the world. We have Indexes, Sectors, Stocks and other assets throughout My Chartbook. One thing I learned a long time ago is to also pay attention to the bellwethers. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot, but we take it a little more seriously around here. There are only a few of them and today I want to draw your attention specifically to what is happening in shares of J.P. Morgan.
Today we're looking at a chart that highlights a major divergence that's plagued the Indian stock market since January 2018.
We've spoken about this topic in the past, but keep drilling it home every few months because it remains one of the key reasons why Indian Equities as an asset class are struggling.
Today will be a "big" day for markets as the Federal Reserve will announce their decision on the new target Federal Funds Rate.
Currently, markets are pricing in a roughly 80% chance of a 25bp cut and a 20% chance of a 50bp cut. This means market participants have assigned 0% odds to rates remaining where they are after today's meeting.
We've been pretty clear over the last few months about where we stand regarding the different asset classes, so there's not much left to do other than wait and see how prices settle by the end of the week.
With that said, here are a few charts we're watching through Friday's close.
Selling continues and now many broader market and sector indices are at or below support, so in this post, we'll look at some of those charts and assess the damage that's been done.
In this Episode of Allstarcharts Weekly, Steve and I discuss the Intermarket Relationships that help identify the next direction for US Interest Rates. These assets include Regional Bank Stocks, Utilities, Real Estate Investment Trusts, Copper, Gold and TIPS among others. Which way are Rates heading next?
We've been watching some of the Energy ETFs we track most of this year for potential mean-reversion opportunities on the long side.
We recently discussed for our Institutional Clients an opportunity in the Small-Cap Energy ETF (PSCE), which rallied 17.50% from its 2018 lows before reversing back to those levels again.
The main issue in Energy remains that there appears to be an attractive mean reversion opportunity at the ETF level, but when we drill down into individual stocks there aren't many clean setups...making it difficult to identify what the main drivers of this move higher would be.
Let's take a look.
For the purpose of this exercise, we're going to look at Oil Services ETF (OIH) because its risk management level is the cleanest of the Energy subsectors.
JC and I are generally on the same page about a lot of things, but this week our brains seem to be very in sync as we're writing about the same topics with a slightly different spin on each subject.
With U.S. Large-cap Indexes breaking out to new all-time highs, many are wondering when, and if, the Small-caps are ever going to catch up. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P500 and Nasdaq100 have all taken out former highs and are currently in uncharted territory. The Mid-caps, Small-caps and Micro-caps, however, are still all well below their 2018 highs.
While we like to pride ourselves in looking at more charts per week than almost anyone on earth, I get a lot of value from regularly speaking to clients and colleagues. Tuesday was one of those days that I found myself on the phone speaking with people around the world. One theme that came up multiple times was the underperformance in Small-cap stocks throughout the late 90s. It's something we've seen before. U.S. Large-cap stocks can do very very well even with small-caps underperforming, like they have since last year.