Saturday, November 21, 2009

Financial Tides - BarChart weekly market momentum w/e 11/20/09

On Financial Tides I always try to give a weekly analysis of the status of the stock market. Sometimes the press about the market reminds me of an impressionist painting. You can stand too close and all you see are brush strokes and patches of color. It's hard to tell what the painting is about. You've got to back up and view the painting from a wider perspective and then all those brush strokes and patches of color start to make sense and your mind now translates the chaos into a wonderful image you can appreciate.

The market reports were like that this week. Market up and down, gold, oil and the dollar sometimes going up together then reversing sometimes traveling independently and all the time the headlines on different news sites interpreting things differently. There were times when the headlines in different articles on the same page had the market going in different directions.

Let's step back across the room and try to make sense of all the different brush strokes, textures and blotches of color. As always I go to BarChart to find my data and start with the Value Line Index. I use that index because it contains 1700 stocks not just the 30 of the Dow or the 500 of the S&P 500.

Value Line Index -- 1700 stocks -- down .65% for the week but still up 4.38% month to date.
  • BarChart's 13 technical indicators have the Index rated 5 buys, 3 holds and 5 sells for an overall rating of hold
  • The Index closed on Friday above it's 20, 50 & 100 day moving averages

Weekly market momentum -- 6000 stocks -- the percentage of stocks closing above their Daily Moving Averages

  • 20 DMA -- 55.67% closed above
  • 50 DMA -- 46.77% closed above
  • 100 DMA -- 68.77% closed above

Ratio of stocks hitting new highs to those hitting new lows for various time periods -- above 1.01 bullish, 1.00 neutral, below .99 bearish

  • 20 day new high/new low ratio -- 313/599 = .52
  • 65 day new high/new low ratio -- 164/323 = .51
  • 100 day new high/new low ratio -- 144/162 = .89

Summary: The market did not advance this week; there are signs for caution but not for panic. This week if some of the stocks in my portfolio start tanking below their 50 DMA I might do some culling but I'd like to see the ratio of new highs to new lows improve before I'd be ready to say the market is safe again -- what am I saying: the market is never safe. Always have protective stop loses on your major positions.

Wall Street Survivor results -- the contributors to Top Stocks who make stock recommendations place those recommendations in a model portfolio for a little friendly competition. For the month so far the S&P 500 is up 5.33 and 4 of the 8 contestants have beaten that benchmark. The leader is Anthony Mirhaydan with 26.92% and then Vad Yazvinski at 9.10% with me a distant 3rd with 7.89%. Next week is another week.

Disclosure: I do not hold any positions in any of the stocks in my model portfolio.

Jim Van Meerten is an investor who writes on financial matters here and on Financial Tides. Please leave a comment below or email FinancialTides@gmail.com

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