As our readers ponder the implications of trade wars and the possibility for moderately higher inflation - a circular loop if we ever did see one - we thought we'd evaluate the market's behavior to see what kind of clues it's giving us about its...
By now it's common knowledge that the stock market is extremely overbought by nearly any measure one chooses to use. This has led many investors to infer a weaker forward return profile than usual on the logic that the normalization in the overboughtness of the...
Indicators of market breadth are often useful in confirming or telegraphing important trend changes in equity markets. In simple terms, indicators of market breadth measure the level of participation of individual stocks in the general trend of the market. At bear market lows, almost all...
The last week has witnessed the return of multi-directional volatility in the equity markets for the first time since just before the election in the United States last November. At this point we have little reason to suspect the 2% mini correction in the S&P...
One would have thought that coming off of the worst day in the financial markets since 2008 stocks would been thoroughly oversold to such an extreme that a snap back rally would be inevitable. Unfortunately that is not the case today as our quantitative measures...
Using an admittedly brute indicator of overbought/oversold conditions, stocks are clearly overbought here in the short-term. The number of stocks trading above their own 20-day moving average has spiked from just 4% (very oversold) to 86% in just 33 trading days. The trend is most...
With 3 hours of trading left today the S&P 500 finds itself back at the same level it traded at two years ago and down about 15% from the May 2015 high. Scary as this sounds, with today's action stocks will move further into oversold...
With the MSCI Emerging Markets Index down about 17% from its high at the end of April we thought we'd provide a visual depiction of the selloff so readers can glean a better understanding of the action underneath the surface of the markets. Oftentimes due to...
In our view one of the most blunt and useful indicators of momentum is measuring the percent of stocks in an index whose 50-day moving average is higher than the 200-day moving average. It sounds simple and it is, but the movement of indicator does...
Unlike the majority of this six year old bull market, European and Asian stocks are outperforming North American stocks in 2015 (yes even measured in USD). Asian stocks are nearly 12% higher, European stocks are nearly 10% higher and North America stocks are just about...
On an equal-weighted, USD basis, Russia is up 46% year-to-date, by far the best performing country in the MSCI All-Country World Index. Coming in second, is China which is up 29%. India is the 14th best performing country (8.2%)....
As baseball season commences we thought it only appropriate to draw an analogy between America’s favorite pass-time and investing. As every good baseball fan knows, batters in baseball acquire a batting average that is aggregation of a players cumulative hits divided by the total at-bats...
MSCI World equities are off to a rough start for the month, with 8 out of 10 sectors in negative territory so far: The percentage of stocks above their respective moving averages has fallen: And the number of stocks making new lows has jumped to...
Earlier this week we touched on the fact that new highs in individual stocks have not expanded much despite the continued new highs all year in the headline indices....
Here is yet another indicator highlighting the absolute lack of volatility in the stock market. The below chart measures the cumulative number of stock price moves of 5% or more over the last 65 days for all stocks in the MSCI World Index....
