Lee AdlerWe aren’t out of the woods. There are signs that the 9-12 month cycle down phase could be much worse than I originally had hoped. This includes a new downside cycle projection that won’t make you happy, unless you want to accumulate at lower prices.
Short term cycles turned up on schedule, triggering the overdue upturn in the 6 month cycle. The 13 week cycle up phase got its expected second wind. All cycles from 4 weeks to 6 months are now in gear to the upside. The 4 week cycle currently projects to 3560. The 13 week cycle points higher–a lot higher.
Chart pick performance was strong last week. The average gain grew from +2.5% to +5.0% while the average holding period fell from 14 calendar days to just 8, or barely over a week. Our shorts got stopped out early, protecting a small net gain on those, on balance. Meanwhile the long picks were able to take advantage of the market surge.
I am adding 6 picks to the list as of Monday including 3 new longs and 3 new shorts. I am closing out one pick. With these changes, that will leave 10 open picks, 7 longs and 3 shorts.
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Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generate a 5% gain every 8 days? Obviously, that’s not going to happen. But the plus signs are nice. Of course, we’d like to beat buy and hold, too.
A long/short trading strategy won’t do that in a broad, sharp rally like last week’s. That’s because we always have at least a few shorts. That costs us when we have a straight up week in the market. If we consider the last 8 calendar days as a basis for comparing performance, we were about 1 percentage point below a buy and hold SPY strategy.
But always having a few shorts means that we should outperform rangebound and down markets. My technical stock screens will generate lots of shorts when the market is trending down, and hopefully my eyes will recognize the best ones from that group. The goal is that when the market trends down (someday), the chart pick list should not just massively outperform a buy and hold market strategy, not just by losing less. It should be positive on balance.
Another goal I have for these weekly chart picks is for it to be easy to follow. Once a week entries obviously aren’t optimal from a market performance standpoint. But for busy people, it’s a good alternative. We generally have a few picks each weekend that we can enter on Monday morning. Then, setting trailing stops frees us from the trading screen. We can go about having a life!
But I don’t like automatic stops. What about the use of mental stops? I usually put stop levels on the chart pick table. I set an alert to be sent to my phone and computer screen at the stop level. When I’m actively trading my own account, I use a chart trendline or moving average representing my trailing stop line. When I get that alert, I get on that chart quickly. I wait that 2-3 minutes, and if there’s no reversal, I trigger the trade and move on.
Again, this is just my way. I’m sharing it with you for informational purposes. You have to do it your way. I just try to give you useful, actionable, and hopefully profitable, information for you to use as you see fit. If you are not an experienced trader, consult a professional investment advisor for guidance. That’s not what this is.
Past performance doesn’t indicate future results. There’s always risk of loss. Chart picks are theoretical for informational purposes only.
Tax collections improved in October, but are still well below pre-pandemic levels. The US may look like it’s recovering, but it’s still in the hole it dug when Covid19 first hit. That means that Fed policy isn’t likely to change any time soon.
And it also means that we should expect a stimulus package of some kind, at some point. With the uncertainties surrounding a divided government regardless of whether a new Administration takes over, guessing how much stimulus there will be, and its timing, is a fool’s errand. The one thing that we do know is that whenever it comes, the bigger it is, the more bearish it will be.
And if they spend the $1.7 trillion on hand mostly to pay down debt, that would be very bullish.
Meanwhile, economic data is useful for guessing what Fed policy will be, and under normal circumstances might be useful for making an educated guess about fiscal policy. It’s not possible to translate this data directly into an expected market outcome. It always comes down to measuring the strength and persistence of the trend through technical analysis, and more direct liquidity inputs, such as the PONTs. That’s essentially the difference between the quantity of Fed QE versus the amount of new Treasury issuance.
This data gives us an outline of where the economy really stands, and what it means for the outlook for stocks and bonds.
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There were some positive signs for gold last week and they are coming at just the right time.
We’ve had two working theses over the past few months. One is that the Fed is no longer pumping enough cash into dealer accounts to keep an endless bull trend going. Instead, at best, there’s only enough for rotation between stocks and bonds.
The second thesis was that because dealers are so leveraged, any fall in bond prices, reflected in an increase in bond yields, would mean big trouble for the markets. Based on technical analysis, I guessed that the Maginot Line for the bond market was 0.80 on the 10 year Treasury yield.
It’s early yet but, last week we saw evidence in the stock market that these theories are working in practice. The 10 year yield traded persistently above 0.80, and stocks sold off.
Not only wasn’t there rotation, where selling in one market translates to buying the other, but both markets were weak. The selling was contagious, leading to net portfolio liquidation, losses, and equity destruction. This increases the danger of margin calls, which can become self-feeding.
The big question is just how much pain will the Fed tolerate?
Because more pain is coming. A lot more.
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The bears took control last week, crushing all the uptrend lines I had drawn on this chart. Now we have a well-defined downtrend. The market has also edged below several old long term and intermediate trendline extensions. If these aren’t immediately recrossed, the downside becomes wide open.
Chart pick performance slipped last week, with the average gain falling from +3.8% to +2.5%. The average holding period rose from 13 calendar days to 14, just two weeks as recent longs got whipsawed.
12 longs were stopped out last week. That was, in fact, all of them. I am adding 5 picks to the list as of Monday, including 4 longs and 1 short. That will leave 8 open picks – 4 longs and 4 shorts.
I read somewhere that past performance doesn’t suggest future results. I’ll say! Of course, considering how the market got clobbered last week, I don’t think that a long-only, buy and hold strategy did too well.
Now I want to do a little “what-if” exercise. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake and there’s something that I’ve been noticing for… oh… the past 25 years or so. That something is the evidence that the traditional 4 year cycle died decades ago.
By simply tweaking indicators around that traditional time frame, I have been trying to make a square peg fit a round hole. But they never seem to fit the action. Something has not been right. It has been staring us in the face the whole time.
What if… what if…, skewed by aggressive monetary policy, the dominant cycle since 1994 has been 7-8 years, as it appears to be. And what if that’s still the case? I have superimposed 7-8 year cycle indicators on the monthly chart. And wow! Is that revealing! It’s a completely different message than the one we’ve been trying to make sense of.
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Past performance doesn’t indicate future results. There’s always risk of loss. Chart picks are theoretical for informational purposes only. These reports are intended for professional investors and experienced individual traders. Do your own due diligence before trading.
