We've been pointing out historic breadth readings since this summer. We've actually seen a handful of extreme readings that typically occur at major market lows and the early stages of new secular bull markets.
We've seen them across most major indexes as well, even Small and Mid-Caps.
For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
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...
Wow! What an open for stocks today. The votes are in and investors have decided the winner is: STOCKS. Of course, I'm told there's some positive vaccines news which may be accounting for the run up we're seeing today. Either way, all the major stock indices are printing new all-time highs today --- something you don't see in bear markets.
Our latest Under the Hood report is out and there's a bevy of opportunities to choose from. And given the week we've just had, my favorite idea supports something I think we all could use a little more of -- rest.
Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended November 6, 2020.
What we do is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
Whether we're measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers... there is a lot of overlap.
The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we're producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.
With the market coming off one of its best weeks in a while, there are good-...
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
There was a lot of movement across asset classes over the last week, but more importantly, the market gave us some key inflection points to trade against.
In this post, we're going to look at Precious Metals and review how we should be approaching them.
Do stock market crashes normally happen when investors are expecting one?
I'm pretty sure it's the opposite of that.
Well, this is the chart being passed around this week. We're looking at the United States Crash Confidence Index, where fewer than 15% of respondents think NO crash is going to happen.
So in other words, almost 90% of respondents think "a catastrophic stock market crash in the U.S., like that of October 28, 1929 or October 19, 1987, is probable in the next six months, including the case that a crash occurred in the other countries and spreads to the U. S."
Thanks to everyone for participating in this Week's Mystery Chart. Most of you were sellers but the chart was inverted, so you were actually buyers.
We'd be buying this chart too, so let's dive right in and see what it is and why we're all so bullish.
This week's chart was the Invesco Chinese Technology ETF $CQQQ.
In this post, we'll dig into the strongest Chinese technology stocks and outline some trade ideas as a way to express our bullish thesis.
We'll also discuss some intermarket implications of this ETF and its components.
We're going to take a close look at these Chinese tech giants and see if we can glean some insight into the internals of CQQQ in addition to other International Indexes.
First of all, the chart looks a good deal different than it did when we posted the Mystery Chart earlier this week.
This isn't just because it was inverted, but also because...
They always make a big fuss about "Sell in May and Go Away", but rarely do you they tell you to "Remember to Buy in November". Or as my friend Jeff Hirsch, of the Stock Trader's Almanac, likes to put it, "Buy in October and Get Yourself Sober".
All these sayings derive from the fact that since 1950, every single dollar made in the Dow Jones Industrial Average has come between the months of November through April. In fact, had you bought the Dow on the first trading day in May every year since 1950 and sold on Halloween, you would actually have negative return (or close to it, anyway. I believe the past couple of years put it in the black).
Now, within the "Best 6 Months" of the year, you have an even sweeter spot: November - January.
The way I see it, if stocks couldn't fall during what is historically...
I don't think there's any doubt that we'll be seeing a surge in healthcare spending in the coming months and years. And while that makes for a good story, the charts in the healthcare sector offer a more compelling narrative.
Breaking away from custom here, we'll be taking a shot in a laggard in this sector that offers us a pretty clear risk management level and an affordable opportunity for us to buy time for the catch up to commence.
When I was going through my charts this week, this is one of the ones that stood out the most. I see Biotechnology, on both an equally-weighted and cap-weighted basis, breaking out of major bases.
More specifically, if you look at the Cap-weighted Index Fund $IBB, we're talking about half a decade of no progress. It looks to me like this is all changing now:
Click on Charts to Zoom in
Look at Biotech relative to the rest of the stock market. Again, I'm seeing a half-decade long consolidation resolving higher:
Look how clean this chart below of $XBI is. This is the equally-weighted Biotech Index fund breaking out of a 5-year base to new all-time highs. Then, achieving its price objective near 120, consolidating further, and now starting its next leg higher, in my opinion.
Our target in $XBI is 167 and this is a group we want to own if it's above 120: