Pull the trigger with confidence.

I like just about all types of breadth indicators, but I have learned that each type of breadth data requires its own proper manner of interpretation.  The whole point of looking at breadth data is to get a different answer about market behavior than what prices are saying, and hopefully that different answer is a useful one.

For this reason, I do not pay much attention to the difference between New Highs (NH) and New Lows (NL).  Each of those items can be interesting on its own, if... Read More

Most of the time, the spot price of copper is very well correlated with what stock prices do.  Occasionally there is a momentary squeeze in the copper market, resulting in a spike top that is not reflected in stock prices, and that is quite ordinary.  We saw several such spike tops in 2021, and once more in early 2022.

A better indication comes from outside of those brief squeeze events, when we see a more persistent divergence between the two plots.  We are seeing such a divergence right... Read More

We have been seeing a lot of breadth divergences lately, and the granddaddy of them all is adding to that list right now.  The Daily Advance-Decline (A-D) Line for the NYSE is making lower highs, which disagrees with the slightly higher highs seen recently in both the DJIA and the SP500. 

This latest divergence since mid-April is a small one, but small divergences can still be problematic. In fact, this is one of the problems with A-D Line divergences, in that we never know how long they... Read More

Last week I addressed the divergence that was evident between the share price of QQQ and its equal-weighted cousin, QQEW.  Both of those ETFs are designed to track the stocks in the Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX).  This same divergence is evident in this week's chart, which shows the daily A-D Line for the component stocks which make up the Nasdaq 100 Index.

An A-D Line is a cumulative running total of all daily Advances and Declines.  It changes each day by the value for the daily breadth (A-D). ... Read More

Earnings news from big cap Nasdaq stocks like Microsoft and Meta (used to be Facebook) have been pushing up the capitalization-weighted indices, and also pushing up the share price of QQQ, the ETF which tracks the Nasdaq 100 Index.  In those cap-weighted indices, the behaviors of the big cap stocks matter a whole lot more toward the calculation of the index value.  But the behaviors of the other components can tell us more about the health of the liquidity available to lift all stocks.

The... Read More

Inflation rates have been coming back down from their big post-Covid spike to above 8%.  But they are likely to see a brief upturn, if this week's guest fortune-teller is correct.

The movements of the price of lead tend to get repeated about 4 months later in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).  That is the message in this week's chart.  Lead is an industrial metal which most of us do not think about now that it has been taken out of gasoline, but it still finds uses in lead-acid car batteries,... Read More

Crude oil prices were in the middle of an uptrend when Russia invaded Ukraine just over a year ago, and that news caused oil prices to spike up to over $120/barrel.  But oil prices have given back those gains, getting cut almost in half since the last poke above $120 in June 2022.  This has led the big-money "commercial" traders of crude oil futures to pare their short positions in a big way, as seen in this week's chart.

Every Friday, the CFTC publishes its weekly Commitment of Traders... Read More

The big tech darlings like Microsoft and Apple have a big weighting in the the SP500 and in the Nasdaq 100 (NDX), and their recent strength has pulled the NDX up to a higher high.  But we are not seeing confirmation of that in this week's chart.

This week's chart shows an indicator that I feature numerically every day in my Daily Edition.  It depicts the number of stocks in the Nasdaq 100 that are currently above their own 100-day simple moving averages.

I built this years ago, after... Read More