From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

If you ask people what it would take for Small-Caps to begin outperforming you'll get a variety of answers. We need Financials to outperform. We need a weak US Dollar. We need a steeper yield curve. We need the moon to be in a waxing crescent. We need a miracle.

You'll have a lot of answers and a whole lot more confusion.

So in this post, we want to keep it simple and identify the two charts we're using to identify a sustainable turn in Small-Cap relative performance.

Did you think it would be a historic stock market crash and a devastating global pandemic that would finally spark the rotation into emerging market stocks?

Yea me neither.

But here we are. 6 weeks of outperformance by Emerging Markets. Is this just another blip in the long-term downtrend for EM, particularly relative to US Equities?

We discussed this all in our NEW Q3 Playbook that was just published over the weekend.

Here's some perspective on the whole thing:

Financials are what we're watching very closely this week as a warning of a more substantial stock market correction throughout the summer.

Our strategy has been to buy stocks that are going up. That's worked well. But if you noticed, that has NOT included financials. It's been mostly in the Technology, Internet, Social Media, Biotech & Mobile Payments sectors. That has been our go-to universe during this multi-month rally in stocks.

However, even though we haven't been buying bank stocks, that doesn't mean we just ignore them. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you recall, it was the bank stocks that helped us get so bearish in early February, well before any market crash. We are focused on this group again today for the exact same reasons: Risk Management.

Here is a chart of Financials flirting with that 23 level. That represents the former highs from April. If we're below that, the risk in here is down, and not up:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In recent weeks, we've witnessed a powerful rotation as many of the secular laggards have assumed short-term leadership positions.

In today's post, we're going to take a stab at using a new visualization tool in order to illustrate this recent changing of the guard.

This scatter plot is comparing the maximum drawdown from 52-week highs to the March lows (Y-Axis) with the short-term performance off of the May 13th low, among all of the 150+ Dow Jones Industry Indexes. The plot-sizes are based on how large the current drawdown is... In other words, the bigger the dot, the bigger the drop.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Sentiment has not been good for Chinese Equities with a handful of recent sanctions adding to the general uncertainty around China-US relations. For the most part, we're seeing this reflected in price as the Shanghai Composite and iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) are trading at multi-month lows relative to the S&P 500.

Interestingly enough, the area being hit hardest with negative headlines is one of the few bright spots in China's market right now... Technology and Internet stocks.

In this post, we take a look at the improving relative strength from this group and offer trade ideas in some of its leading stocks.

Here is the ratio chart of the Kraneweb Chinese Internet ETF (KWEB) vs the S&P 500 (SPY) which we've been writing about since November.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

JC summed up our present view on US Equities perfectly during this week's Conference Call:

"There are stocks we want to buy, and there are stocks we want to sell," he told Premium Members on Monday night.

Some areas, particularly the secular leaders coming into the selloff, continue to trend aggressively higher while others refuse to participate in any meaningful upside.

A great example of this is illustrated by contrasting the chart of the Dow Jones Transports (DJT) to what we consider the "New Dow Theory" Average, the PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX).

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Breadth divergences from earlier this year took a while to confirm, but once they did we saw considerable downside.

My Chart Summit Presentation was on how I use statistics and scans to visualize market internals for insight on breadth and relative strength. I used tables from our Weekly Momentum Reports in January and February to illustrate the clear deterioration in participation taking place at the time despite the major indexes grinding to new highs.

In this post, we’ll do a similar exercise and use stats to analyze whether breadth has been improving or deteriorating in Global Equity Markets over the past month.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

There has been a lot of talk about the potential implications on the broader market if Mega-Cap Growth and Technology stocks were to lose their leadership. Since they have been responsible for driving much of the gains in the major averages for years now... we can only ask ourselves, who might pick up the slack if and when this happens?

In this post, we're going to analyze the top-performing areas today and compare them to their strength before the market crashed in February and March.

We'll also look at the leaders from back then and see how they're holding up today.

This will give us an idea of whether we really are undergoing a change in leadership or not, and if so, where the new areas of strength are.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Yesterday I wrote a post about deteriorating market internals. I discussed breadth divergences as well as the lack of confirmation of the S&P 500's recent highs from many important sectors and indexes.

In this post, we're going to focus specifically on the Large-Cap Sector SPDRs that failed to make higher highs and are showing early signs of cracking. To no surprise, these are some of the most cyclical areas of the market including Industrials (XLI), Financials (XLF), Materials (XLB), and Energy (XLE).

This speaks to the lack of risk-appetite we continue to see not only within equities but across all asset classes right now.

You can see the first three sectors in the chart below. With Crude Oil futures crashing below zero this week, we think it's prudent to stay away from the Energy sector until the smoke clears.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We are always looking at intermarket signals and ratio charts for insight into various asset classes. We've recently written plenty about intermarket relationships that signal risk-appetite, or lack thereof, for stocks as well as others to get a read on yields.

Today's Chart of the Day, High Yield Bonds (HYG) vs Short-Term Treasuries (IEI), is one of our favorite risk-appetite ratios.

Credit Market investors favor High Yield Bonds over Treasury Bonds during the "good times" - periods of strong economic growth, rising rates, etc. On the other hand, we know treasuries are a safe-have asset and outperform in environments where investors are uncertain and want a place to park their capital until the smoke clears.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

If you read our research regularly you may be sick of this by now, so my apologies. But there is a method to our madness. A tried and true repeatable process that allows us to consistently identify the strongest and weakest areas of the market. Any market. While we've focused mainly on US Equities recently, we can apply these same principles to any asset class.

We have continually highlighted the fact that the long-term outperformers are often also the short-term leaders. Why? Because there is empirical evidence to support this and we know it works. I'll be writing an educational post about this soon.

We've also written a lot lately about how one of the main signals we're looking for before turning bullish on stocks is for the percent of NYSE components to break back above 15%. Well, we're still not really close, but with such drastic daily swings in the major indexes, this could change fast so we want to be ready if and when it does.

Long-term Equity charts and breadth measures continue to suggest a defensive approach towards stocks remains appropriate.

With that said, if you're a trader taking advantage of this volatility then the following charts are those we'd watch to determine if the recent bounce can continue.