“Trade what you see; not what you think.” – The Old Fool,
Richard McCranie, trader extraordinaire.
“The big money is not in the buying and selling. But in
the waiting.” - Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway
“Bubbles tend to topple under their own weight. Everybody
is in. The last short has covered. The last buyer has bought (or bought massive
amounts of weekly calls). The decline starts and the psychology shifts from
greed to complacency to worry to panic. Our working hypothesis, which might be disproven, is that September
2, 2020 was the top and the bubble has already popped.” - David
Einhorn, Greenlight hedge fund.
My cmt: The 2 Sept high was 3581, so it looks like
David einhorn was too early.
JOBLESS CLAIMS (Reuters)
“Fewer Americans sought unemployment benefits last week,
but the modest drop did little to dispel concerns that the U.S. job market and
wider economy face an arduous recovery from the devastation inflicted by the
coronavirus pandemic in 2020...While new claims for benefits reported by the
U.S. Labor Department on Thursday dropped for the second week in a row to a
seasonally adjusted 787,000 in the week ended Dec. 26 from 806,000 a week
before, it left them at roughly the level they were three months ago and with
little indication they would show material improvement any time soon.” Story
at...
CORONAVIRUS (NTSM)
Here’s the latest from the COVID19 Johns Hopkins website as
of 9:00pm Thursday. US total case numbers are on the left axis; daily numbers
are on the right side of the graph with the 10-dMA of daily numbers in Green.
MARKET REPORT / ANALYSIS
-Thursday the S&P 500 rose
about 0.6% to 3756, all after 2pm. (New all-time high.)
-VIX slipped about 0.1% to 22.75.
-The yield on the 10-year
Treasury slipped to 0.919%.
Bollinger Bands were overbought today, but not RSI. We’re closer to a top, but perhaps not there
yet. I do expect the markets to retreat in the next week or two, but we’ll see.
Indicators don’t support that opinion yet, but they’re getting closer.
The daily sum of 20 Indicators remained +3 (a positive
number is bullish; negatives are bearish). The 10-day smoothed sum that smooths
the daily fluctuations declined from +14 to 12. (These numbers sometimes change
after I post the blog based on data that comes in late.) Most of these
indicators are short-term and many are trend following.
The Long Term NTSM indicator
ensemble remained BUY. Now, Price & VIX are bullish; Sentiment & Volume
are neutral. Since I think the market is near a top; I will wait before adding
to stock holdings.
The market remains overbought
with the S&P 500 16.1% above its 200-dMA. If past history follows, that
tends to cap the gains going forward and suggest that the downside risk is
greater than the upside risk.
I’ll continue to keep a low %
of funds in the stock market until I see a better buying point. We may see a
Holiday rally until the new year.
MOMENTUM ANALYSIS:
TODAY’S RANKING OF 15 ETFs (Ranked Daily)
The top ranked ETF receives
100%. The rest are then ranked based on their momentum relative to the leading
ETF.
*For additional background on
the ETF ranking system see NTSM Page at…
http://navigatethestockmarket.blogspot.com/p/exchange-traded-funds-etf-ranking.html
TODAY’S RANKING OF THE DOW 30
STOCKS (Ranked Daily)
Here’s the revised DOW 30 and
its momentum analysis. The top ranked stock receives 100%. The rest are then
ranked based on their momentum relative to the leading stock.
For more details, see NTSM
Page at…
https://navigatethestockmarket.blogspot.com/p/a-system-for-trading-dow-30-stocks-my_8.html
THURSDAY MARKET INTERNALS
(NYSE DATA)
Market Internals remained NEUTRAL on the market.
Market Internals are a decent
trend-following analysis of current market action, but should not be used alone
for short term trading. They are usually right, but they are often late. They are most useful when they diverge from
the Index.
Using the Short-term indicator
in 2018 in SPY would have made a 5% gain instead of a 6% loss for buy-and-hold.
The methodology was Buy on a POSITIVE indication and Sell on a NEGATIVE
indication and stay out until the next POSITIVE indication. The back-test
included 13-buys and 13-sells, or a trade every 2-weeks on average.
My current stock allocation is
about 30% invested in stocks. You may wish to have a higher or lower % invested
in stocks depending on your risk tolerance. 30% is a very conservative position
that I re-evaluate daily.
The markets have not
retested the lows on recent corrections and that has left me under-invested on
the bounces. I will need to put less reliance on retests in the future.
As a retiree, 50% in the stock
market is about fully invested for me – it is a cautious and conservative
number. If I feel very confident, I might go to 60%; if a correction is deep
enough, 80% would not be out of the question.