From Decision Point:
After the S&P 500 broke down from the rising wedge pattern I expected that prices would continue to head lower into a 20-Week Cycle low at the end of this month. But no. Instead prices rallied back above the rising trend line which formed the bottom of the wedge. Prices even rallied to a marginal intraday new high, so the rising trend that began at the March lows remains intact. In spite of that, it looks as if prices are forming a double top.
On the chart I have drawn a new rising wedge pattern that conforms to the gradual rolling over that prices appear to be doing. As usual, we should expect prices to break down out of the wedge, and, perhaps, that will lead to the correction we have been awaiting.
Below, our OBV (On-Balance Volume) suite of charts shows the short-term CVI and STVO coming off overbought levels and allowing for further decline in the short-term. The medium-term VTO shows that an internal correction is in progress that appears to be spreading to price behavior.
In his comments today, John Murphy (StockCharts.com) pointed out that large-cap indexes are beginning to out-perform small cap indexes. This should be of special interest to our subscribers because we track both cap-weighted and equal-weighted versions of the major market and sector indexes. (Equal-weighted indexes the smaller-cap stocks in the index to exert more influence on the price of the index.) In the example below, we have a chart of the S&P 500 displayed with the Price Relative to the Rydex S&P Equal Weight ETF (RSP). You can see that the S&P 500 relative strength line trended downward since March, but recently it began to trend upward. The message being that it is probably time to shift money out of the equal-weighted vehicles and into the cap-weighted vehicles. (See signal table below to see how well equal-weighted stocks have performed.)
Bottom Line: Last week I thought that a medium-term correction had begun, but a rally to new highs killed that projection. The market now looks as if it is topping, and internals support the idea that there will be a decline into the end of the month. A further sign of weakness is the fact that money is moving out of small-cap stocks and into large-cap stocks.
Source: Decision Point
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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