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There is a lot going on in the market right now, not just in the U.S. but globally. The intermarket relationships between Bonds, Gold and the US Dollar are having a major impact on equities.
January is a month that gives us a lot more information than most other months throughout the year. We have the data now that we can use to help us identify primary trends.
Volatility is picking up. Daily swings are getting larger. I've seen this story before.
We'll discuss all of this and a lot more on Monday evening.
This month’s Conference Call will be held on Monday February 10th at 7PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of the other calls since 2015.
We often get questions about what levels we're watching or what our stop is, but in truth every market participant has different timeframes, objectives, and plans for how they'll manage their portfolios. It's impossible to answer properly without knowing all of that information.
With that being said, any market participant can identify various levels at which the dynamics of the asset they're trading have changed.
Today I want to walk through an example using the Japan ETF (EWJ) showing how we'd go about identifying those changes through price action and momentum.
We don't have bull markets in America without Financials participating. That's just how it is around here.
I look through a lot of charts, as you guys know, and there are always a few that really stand out and explain the current situation. I've pointed out how there is further potential of overhead supply for stocks at these levels, particularly internationally. That means that, for the most part, the market has proven that there are more willing sellers than buyers around here. You can't see it if you're just looking at S&Ps and the Dow. But when you go sector by sector and country by country, trust me, it's there.
So bringing it back to America, Financials are in quite the predicament. You can't have a success story without an original struggle right? Well this $31 level has been an issue since the epic top in 2007 before the financial crisis:
For those new to the 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?
Today I have a group of charts that I think will help me explain my thought process here. We're keeping this very simple.
Let's go!
The first thing that stands out is the breakout to new all-time highs for the Dow Jones Industrial Average that has not yet been confirmed by the Dow Jones Transportation Average. This rejection in January and failure to exceed those former highs is worrisome. If this market was as strong as some of the other indicators have/had been pointing to, then we should have seen a breakout by now. Here is the Dow Jones Industrial Avg:
Click on Charts to Zoom in
And here is the Dow Jones Transportation Average getting rejected hard last month:
Two weeks ago we outlined our thesis for near-term weakness in stocks in India and around the globe.
Since then we've outlined additional information that seems to support the thesis that the next few weeks, and potentially months, are to be a choppy environment. (Feb 1, Jan 27,Jan 26, and Jan 25).
After some downside follow-through, many are asking: How low can we go?
This week I saw two different charts floating around that I thought deserved a second look based on how they were presented and what their ultimate conclusion was.
The first has to deal with the underperformance of the Equal-Weighted S&P 500 Index, while the second looks at High Dividend Factor ETFs that have gone off the beaten path.
For a variety of different factors, we've wanted to tactically be selling stocks all week and buying bonds instead, particularly US Treasury and Municipal Bonds. The weight of the evidence has been pointing to a more defensive rotation and out of risk assets. We listen to the market and act accordingly. Anything else would be irresponsible.
To be clear, longer-term uptrends in stocks and indexes globally are still intact, so far. Our goals, however, are to make money this quarter. We'll worry about next year, next year. We'll worry about the 3rd and 4th quarters when we get there this summer. For now, as we finished up January we're now entering what is historically the worst of the "Best 6 Months of the year", which go from November through April. So stocks going down in February would be perfectly in line with seasonal trends.