Tech Leads

Well this is just the old diagram of the three sisters and the ugly step sister (IWM) updated to the 20th of November but as I was looking at this this morning it suddenly occurred to me what I was looking at - good old fashioned tech leadership in a bull rally!



"Old fashioned" - right. Anyway for you purists out there this is the proof that the bull rally is for real (at least this week's version of it). A couple of other things to note - IWM is flattening out and finally rolling over. While barely perceptable the ticks in the IWM line are closer together than they were a week ago. Another thing to note is that the SPY is finally crossing over the DIA so maybe the major market will participate to the end of the year now that the INDU has had its day in the sun.

I don't know but I thought this stuff was interesting. You can go back to sleep now.

Tuesday Warm Up

Well folks, everything I see this morning says going to be a consolidation (sideways) day at best. After yesterday the urge to own may turn into an urge to purge. There is no one thing - it is simply a compendium of "stuff". For example volumes in many individual shares yesterday were out of sight. Increased volume is generally a good thing, blow-out volume is a bad thing - most of yesterday's was blow-out levels coupled with the fact that many issues finished well off their highs. The exceptions (there are always exceptions) were found in the NASDAQ where many tech stocks stayed at their peaks.

Last Thursday there was some kind of mini-bottoming event that I know that I missed and I doubt that very many others saw it. The TICK hit a major low in the 1:30 - 3:30 period and after that the market just sort of loosened up resultint in yesterday's action. Yesterday it did it again in the 11:30 to 1:30 period and that brought the rest of the market to its knees - but not the NASDAQ. And the run up in NASDAQ stocks yesterday was broadbased - in other words most of the index participated.

Currently the FTSI 100 is coming off its highs which doesn't usually happen after a U.S. blow out and the fact is the FTSI was in the red for most of yesterday's session as well. Given that only the NASDAQ actually surged forward yesterday with everything else backing up starting in the 11:30 time frame can only mean one of two things. Either the vaunted NASDAQ tech stock leadership is starting to realize that the parade is way ahead of it and it needs to run to get to the lead or tech stocks are going to have a fire sale today.

I'm opting for door number two because the other piece of bad news of the morning is that the futures are starting to collapse. While I don't put much stock in the futures (bad pun) as a predictor when you put that fact together with the other facts it looks like a good day to sit and watch and I think that's what I'm going to do.

Update 09:00 - apparently all is forgotten - futures have turned around as has the FTSI. This, of course, has to do with the fact that the PPI indicates lower inflation so the Fed won't have to raise any more ever again.

Buy with both hands folks - you won't get another chance like this for at least 24 hours.