So now that all the "FANG" stocks have reported earnings and their price performance has essentially dragged equities indexes higher over the past month, now what?
Let's take a look at what's going on in the major asset classes.
Let's start with Bonds. Here's the US 10-Year Note Futures printing their highest monthly close in history, clearly in an uptrend. The Bond market remains in an uptrend both in the US and most markets around the globe.
Every weekend we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
This week we're highlighting the underperformance from the US using our Global Index and International ETF tables.
Click table to enlarge view.
Despite the Wilshire 5000 (DWC) closing slightly higher on the week, all major Large-Cap averages in the US closed lower. While equities sold off across the board to end the week, the Eurozone still managed to book a nice gain with the German Dax (DAXX) and Stoxx 50 (STOXX) up 4-5% each in what was a short week for much of the region.
The Nikkei 225 (NI) and Shanghai Composite (SSEC) each closed almost 2% higher in what was also a short week for much of Asia.
Many International Markets were closed on Friday which skews the weekly performance data in their favor as they did not experience the selloff the US did to close out the week. We...
Weekends are a great time to take a step back and rip through thousands of charts to see what's really going on. The S&P500, Dow and all those other indexes can only provide so much information. At a certain point, you need to get your hands dirty and a really look under the hood.
This weekend was especially informative because we got new Monthly Charts on Thursday and new Weekly Charts on Friday. That's like Christmas for me.
Today I want to go over a few of the most important charts we want to keep an eye on going into the "Sell in May and Go Away" period.
Now that April is in the books that old Wall Street adage of “Sell in May and Go Away” is making its annual tour around the world of financial media. The reason this is such a commonly rehearsed phrase this time of year is that it was one of many seasonality trends first introduced by Yale Hirsch in his book, The Stock Traders Almanac.
The theory is rooted in historical research which shows that stocks tend to experience their worst performance between the months of May and October. Alternatively, the best months of the year typically occur between November and April, which is what we're going to cover in this post.
Notice how significant the disparity in average return is between these two six month timeframes.
I can't believe it's already been two weeks since Chart Summit India. Together with our partners, we hosted 20 of the best speakers and thousands of participants to raise money for charities fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were more than 10 hours of content in one day, so today I went back through some of the presentations again and wanted to share some of the information I found valuable.
All of the speakers were great and the videos can be accessed for free at ChartSummit.com/India, so we'd highly encourage you all to check them out. There's a lot of knowledge to benefit from.
As May gets under way, it’s time to review positions with May options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out).
Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.
The best part about the end of the month is that there's always a fresh batch of Monthly Charts waiting for us. We only perform this exercise once the candlesticks are completed, which in this case was Thursday April 30th. It takes me about half an hour to get through them all, which represents roughly 6 hours of my entire year's work. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that there is no single part of my entire process that I find more helpful than this monthly chart review.
You see, this process forces us to take a step back, and gives us no choice but to identify the direction of the primary trends. We use these to put shorter-term trends into context. So no matter what your timeframe is, I think first identifying primary trends, and then working our way down from there, is a huge advantage over a blind bottoms/up approach.
Here are the things that stood out most during my review:
There has been a lot of chatter about the outperformance from Health Care recently. One of the industry groups benefitting from this strength has certainly been Biotechs so we're going to dive into that space today and take a look under the hood.
This week's Mystery Chart is a long-term ratio chart of the Nasdaq Biotech ETF (IBB) relative to the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ). Thanks to everyone for participating. Responses were pretty mixed this week as the chart is at a bit of an inflection point as it tries to hammer out a bottom at key prior lows from 2007-08 and 2011.
Since most of our upside risk management levels have been broken, our broader short thesis is no longer valid. The short-term momentum remains to the upside, so let's talk about what sectors will benefit and the next logical target for the major indexes.