We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
This week we're looking at the stock from the capital goods sector. Stocks from his sector continue to show strength in a consolidation type of market setup.
Many stocks are no where near their all-time highs.
The S&P500 still needs to rally 25% just to get back to its former highs. And that's after the 10% rally that we've already seen in October.
The Nasdaq100 would need to go up another 43% from here just to get back to its highs. And again, that's after it already ripped 12% off its lows this month.
Remember, the average Nasdaq stock fell 44% from its highs during the bear market. The average small & micro cap stock dropped about 50%.
And since most stocks are so far from their highs, investors are having a hard time calling this a bull market.
"They need to make new all-time highs for it to be a bull market", they say to me.
So ok, let's play that game.
None of these prices here below were new all-time highs. So was this a bear market then?
Generally speaking, more stocks are going up than going down in bull markets.
And sure, there are a lot of different ways to quantify it, but this is really the gist of it: Are more stocks going up or are more of them going down?
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts
This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow.
In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.
We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.
Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.