This week on the podcast we have the pleasure of chatting with Craig Johnson, Chief Market Technician at Piper Jaffray. I've known Craig for a long time and love the work that he puts out. During the day he speaks to buy side clients all over the world. As a past president of the CMT Association, he has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the history of technical analysis. His perspective based on who he speaks to and his experiences throughout his career make me want to listen when he has something to say. In this conversation we discuss the rest of the year for U.S. stocks and sectors. There's a part in this episode that focuses on breadth and what we're both looking for moving forward. Inflation, or lack thereof, is something he's watching, so we talk about Gold, Oil and other inflationary factors that could impact stocks and bonds. We covered a lot. I really enjoyed this one!
Most of the Equally-Weighted Sector Indexes we track have been underperforming their Cap-Weighted counterparts for the last 16 months, however, we are starting to see some signs that a counter-trend rally in three sectors may be brewing.
Last week's Mystery Chart Reveal focused on the rotation into Industrial stocks. In this post I'm going to point out five names in this sector from the S&P 1500 with extremely well-defined risk and skewed reward/risk at current levels.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is my favorite of all of the stock market indexes. You know how many charts we look at every week at our shop. So with the plethora of price data that comes across my desk, it's really the simplicity of the 30 stocks that represent the Dow that makes me appreciate the index for what it is.
The Dow is a price weighted index where the highest priced stocks represent a larger portion of the index. For this reason, it often gets dismissed in favor of the "broader-based", market cap-weighted S&P500. Some like myself even prefer the Russell3000 index which is really representative of the US Stock market. Funny enough, as different as these indexes may be on paper, that's why they play the game. Here are what the 3 of these things look like in real life.
Most of the stocks we've liked on the long side have either been stopped out or are well on their way to our upside objectives. While we're remaining patient and think many stocks still need to consolidate their recent gains, that doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities right now.
In this post I'm going to outline the stocks where our risk is very well-defined and reward/risk is skewed in our favor. That way we can participate in any potential upside if the market continues higher, while also limiting our downside should it succumb to the near-term weakness we've been on watch for.
Have you ever heard that the stock market cannot go higher on an absolute basis if the Equally-Weighted S&P 500 is underperforming its Cap-Weighted counterpart. Does this measure of market breadth have any predictive value with respect to market direction? What about the sectors themselves? Well, we've run the numbers and the answer is no!
A few weeks ago I wrote about Shippers, Casinos, and some Construction/HomeBuilding Related stocks being some of the weakest areas of the market. About the message the market would be sending if those stocks couldn't see downside follow-through after breaking down.
This week we have a special guest on the podcast: Eddy Elfenbein of Crossing Wall Street and PM for the $CWS Exchange Traded Fund. This is a show about Technical Analysis so I think it's important to also include some of the masters of Fundamental Analysis to tell us how they find charts and technicals helpful in their process. Eddy is one of the original Financial Bloggers and I have a ton of respect for him and his work. He is a pioneer in both social media and portfolio management. I love how he explains his appreciation for Intermarket Analysis and Relative Strength as useful tools throughout his process. As many of you know, these two are near and dear to my heart so it's cool to see the Fundamental community embracing them in similar ways. This was a fun conversation!
Long-term, we're bullish Equities in India and around the world, but are remaining patient in the near-term due to momentum and breadth divergences we've been seeing across major indexes, sectors, and individual names. It's happening in the US too.
We've been writing about this for a few weeks, so I wanted to follow up today and show the progression of that thesis.
Healthcare Providers quickly went from hero to zero in Q4 of 2018 after a failed breakout and bearish momentum divergence, but we're beginning to see signs of a potential mean-reversion over the short-term.
Let's start with Healthcare relative to the S&P 500, which has been unable to find its footing since topping 5 months ago. Prices have now retraced 61.8% of their 2018 rally, which may offer some short-term support and transition the trend from down to sideways.
What does it mean when you hear, "Overhead Supply"? How does that help anyone?
The market is a beautiful thing. It's driven by supply and demand dynamics, or buyers and sellers, based on reasons that we don't need to know. I've noticed that the majority of market participants like to worry about the "why?". We choose to worry about the "Where, When and For How Long?". It seems like a much better use of our time, particularly if our only goal is to make money. We're not interested in writing gossip columns.
For me, overhead supply is when there are an overwhelming amount of sellers relative to the amount of buyers around a certain price. Sometimes you get the smartass in the room that says, "Well JC for every buyer there must be a seller". Yes, dummy, but there aren't an equivalent amount of willing buyers and sellers and every price. That's why stocks move.
