“After sitting out much of the more than 100% rally since the lows of 2009, individual investors are finally starting to put money to work in stocks. According to Josh Brown of theReformedBroker.com, the cash coming into the market shows a public not only eschewing hotshot money managers but also crushing them at their own game....Brown says $18 billion went into ETFs in September, and two-thirds of it was put into the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY).” Full story at…
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/individual-investors-beating-pros-own-game-josh-brown-171848031.html
As noted, Josh Brown is using ETF data, not just mutual fund data. (The individual investor has not come back to Mutual Funds.) This news looks like a major top may be getting near. Who really knows? The NTSM sentiment value is currently 51%-bulls, a neutral reading, so the sort of top signaled by late-comers arriving to the party is not confirmed by my sentiment data…not yet anyway
EMPLOYMENT from CNN/MONEY
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) – “Claims
for unemployment benefits fell sharply last week to their lowest level in more
than four years, but the drop was due mostly to a technical issue….About 339,000
people filed for first-time unemployment benefits in the week ended October 6,
down 30,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday…Much of
the drop last week was caused by an anomaly, a Labor Department analyst told
CNNMoney. One state posted a large decline in claims, which is not typical
during the last week in September.” Full
story at…http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/11/news/economy/unemployment-benefits/index.html?iid=HP_River
The key point here: “…the
drop last week was caused by an anomaly…”
We’ll have to wait until next week to know what is going on with
unemployment claims.
MARKET
RECAP
Thursday the S&P 500
was UP just a whisker, basically unchanged at 1433 (rounded) and VIX fell about
4% to 15.59.
NTSM
The
NTSM analysis remained HOLD Thursday.
The
NTSM Price indicator tracks the size of up vs. down movements in the stock
market. The Price indicator has been in
positive territory for about 3-1/2 months.
Today it switched to neutral, so all of my indicators are now in neutral
territory. That brings the NTSM analysis
closer to a sell signal, but there is no point in trying to guess which way the
market will go from here. It could
simply turn back upward.
At this point, longer term measures of market internals {breadth (numbers of stocks advancing) and stocks making new-highs vs. new lows} aren’t supporting an upswing. I’ll be tracking the NTSM indicators carefully; a switch to a sell would not be surprising.
MY INVESTED POSITION
Based on the BUY signal, 6
July, I moved back into the market on 9 July (after the weekend) at S&P 500
1352.
I currently have a 50%
stock allocation overall. For my age,
that is what many advisors recommend as a fully invested position, however, I
am normally much more aggressive. I have
less invested in stocks now because there’s a lot of risk.
