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When oil prices turned upward from their January 2026 low, that upturn was roughly on schedule.  But the magnitude of the up move we have seen was overdone because of the shutdown of shipping out of the Persian Gulf.  Oil prices are normalizing now, but the uptrend should resume.

I say all of this because of the longstanding leading indication relationship gold prices have with oil prices.  In this week's chart, the plot of gold prices is shifted forward by just under 20 months to reveal... Read More

One of the fun magic tricks which the McClellan Oscillator does is that it gives us a message about who is in charge, the bulls or the bears.  It does this with the formation of "complex" or "simple" structures on either side of the zero neutral level.

My parents, Sherman and Marian McClellan, introduced the McClellan Oscillator to the world back in 1970, with their booklet Patterns For Profit.  The title was very intentional.  The patterns of behavior in the Oscillator tell us far more... Read More

The stock market has seen a powerful advance since the March 30, 2026 price low, led by tech stocks generally and chip stocks more specifically.  Nvidia has been a big part of that, and with a 9% weighting in the Nasdaq 100 (NDX) it has helped to push that index up in a big way.  But now the two are diverging, and that is bad news.

Normally when we think of bearish divergences, they involve a big index and some weaker representation of the market like the Advance-Decline (A-D) Line.  The... Read More

The employment level as a percentage of the US population continues to fall, even though the stock market has been rising.  That breaks a longstanding relationship shown in this week's chart.

Normally the employment level as a percentage of the population bottoms about a year after an important stock market bottom.  The last such price bottom was in September 2022, on a monthly basis.  That should have meant a bottom for the employment/population ratio around September 2023.  Instead it has... Read More

The NYSE's McClellan A-D Oscillator has been below zero since May 11, and so that means the companion McClellan Summation Index has been falling.  The context of how this is happening has an important message for what is next in the stock market.

This week's chart shows the Ratio-Adjusted Summation Index (RASI), which differs slightly from the classic version my parents created in 1969.  The RASI is calculated the same way, but using Advance-Decline (A-D) data that has been adjusted to... Read More

The daily Advance-Decline (A-D) Line for high yield corporate bonds is making a bearish divergence versus the SP500.  This is a concern because it conveys a message saying that there are liquidity problems.

Every day, thousands of corporate bonds are traded much like stocks, and FINRA publishes the data on advances and declines at https://www.finra.org/finra-data/fixed-income/market-activity.  High yield bonds are of special interest to me, because they tend to trade more like the stock... Read More

Note: This article appeared originally in the April 22, 2026 issue of The McClellan Market Report.

The war with Iran and the shutdown of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf caused a big spike in oil prices.  That means anyone with oil is now making a lot more profit from selling it.  Good for them.  But it has created a bit of a mystery - - Why are US drill rigs not responding to this price change?  Why are landowners not responding to the higher prices by drilling for oil?

This week's... Read More

The 14-day Choppiness Index for the SP500 hit a reading of 4.60 on April 17, 2026.  That's on a scale from 0 to 100, and it is the lowest reading in at least the last 30 years.  It might be the lowest ever, but I only checked back 30 years.

The math for the Choppiness Index was created by Australian commodities trader E.W. Driess, as a way to quantify how choppy (or not) the recent price action has been.  It shows a high reading when above 62, or a low reading below 38 (Driess was evidently... Read More