Pull the trigger with confidence.

For years I have been tracking the investor sentiment data series known as the NAAIM Exposure Index.  It is compiled by the National Association of Active Investment Managers (NAAIM), which surveys its members weekly concerning their firms’ overall equity exposure as of each Wednesday.  Responses can vary widely, as indicated below:

Range of Responses:

200% Leveraged Short
100% Fully Short
0% (100% Cash or Hedged to Market Neutral)
100% Fully Invested
200% Leveraged Long

The... Read More

There are answers available to the observant about what lies ahead in the future.  To enjoy those answers, one must accept that they are imperfect answers.

Gold is the great leader of many other financial market data series.  It leads grain prices by 15 months.  It leads crude oil prices by just under 20 months.  It leads long term interest rates by just over 20 months.  And that is the point of this week’s chart.

It compares gold futures prices to the Treasury Yield Index, which... Read More

We are seeing some wild numbers for Nasdaq share volume lately, much bigger than anything in recent years.  This points to a speculative blowoff underway.

For many years, analysts have looked at the ratio of Nasdaq to NYSE volume as an indicator of tops and bottoms for stock prices.  This week’s chart shows a 10-day simple moving average of that daily ratio.  The current reading is the highest since all the way back in 2001, when the stock market was in the process of violently unwinding... Read More

Sometimes it is not about what you know, but who you listen to.  And if you learn to get answers from unusual places where no one else is looking, that can be the most useful information of all.

The value of the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar has long been known to fluctuate in sympathy with oil prices.  That makes sense, because the Canadian oil sands have long been a big source of overall North American oil production.  The economics of that type of extraction took a big hit with... Read More

A lot of people look at Bitcoin as a great trading vehicle, and good for them (the ones who have been long this year).  But Bitcoin prices have another value, as a messenger about what is coming for the stock market.

I looked at this relationship here back in January 2018, and again in May 2018, examining how the movements of Bitcoin prices were showing up after a varying lag time in the movements of the stock market.  Back then, the lag time was anywhere from 49-56 calendar days.  The... Read More

To get an important price top, you usually need to see the Advance-Decline (A-D) numbers quiet down.  We do not have that condition now, and thus we likely are not seeing the conditions for an important price top (yet). 

The Fosback Absolute Breadth Ratio was created decades ago by Norman Fosback.  It ignores whether the A-D difference is positive or negative, and focuses just on the size of it.  The absolute value of the daily A-D difference is normalized by dividing by A+D (to adjust for... Read More

Several years ago, I undertook a project, intent upon proving that there was no possible relationship between gold prices and full moons as some other analysts had asserted.  I confess that I failed in that effort, because it became pretty clear quite quickly that there was indeed a relationship between the two. 

The frustrating part is that defining exactly what that relationship is remains elusive.  Full moon dates pretty reliably mark important points for gold prices.  But those points... Read More

There is more information in the plot of a McClellan Price Oscillator than just up or down, high or low.   Looking at its structures can give us additional information about the strength of a trend.

This week’s chart looks at the AMEX Gold Miners Index, GDM.  It is showing us things right now which make for a good opportunity for a lesson about Price Oscillator structures.  The Price Oscillator for the GDM is falling right now, but there is more information in its chart plot than just up... Read More