Dow 12,000: Pit Stop or Market Top?
Filed under: Forecasts, Indices, Technical Analysis, DJIAThe tug-of-war between the U.S. stock market's bulls and bears continues, and the next demarcation line appears to be the psychologically-significant Dow 12,000 level.
The market's bulls argue t...
Default Risk For Financials Shoots Up
During the financial crisis, we created an index that tracks credit default swap prices for the major banks and brokers across the world. This essentially measures default risk for the financial sector. After declining significantly for the past 9 mont...
What Is Getting Hit Hardest?
We broke the S&P 500 into deciles (10 groups of 50 stocks) based on stock performance in 2009 to see if the big winners from last year are the ones getting hit the hardest on the recent pullback. As shown below, they definitely are. The 50 best per...
Ugly Tape
After trading up nearly 1% in the morning, the major markets have tumbled in afternoon trading. This type of action, when the market trades sharply down even though economic reports and earnings reports both beat estimates handily, is not good. There's...
Sector Earnings Beat Rate and Stock Performace
The current earnings per share "beat" rate this earnings season is 73% for all US stocks. Below we highlight the percentage of companies in each sector that have beaten estimates. As shown, only three sectors have a higher beat rate than the overall ma...
Percentage of Stocks Above 50-Day Moving Averages
As shown below, the percentage of stocks above their 50-day moving averages in the S&P 500 has dropped to 35%. This is the lowest level seen since mid-2009. Clearly breadth has gotten weak on this pullback. No sectors have more than 50% of stocks a...
10-Day A/D Line For Materials At Most Oversold Level Since October 2008
The 10-Day A/D Line for the S&P 500 Materials sector is currently more oversold than at any other point since October 2008. It is also currently showing the eleventh most oversold reading since 1990. In the chart below, we highlight each of those o...
Dow Breaks Another Support Level
As shown in the chart below, the Dow has just broken below its support level at the 10,100 mark. This support was formed by the peak in the index in mid-October. Some commentators have been blaming the drop on more tax proposals in Obama's State of the...
Two 200-Day Breaks
Two big asset-classes had major long-term trend reversals today. When a stock or index is trading above its 200-day moving average, it is considered to be in a long-term uptrend. When the price is trading below the 200-day, it is considered to be in a ...
Can’t Blame Earnings Season
The earnings picture continues to look impressive. Heading into the close yesterday, the earnings beat rate (% of companies beating EPS estimates) stood at 71%, which is high in its own right. Last night and this morning, another 64 companies reported ...
Lots on Deck Tomorrow
As shown below, 42% of stocks in the S&P 500 are currently trading below their 50-day moving averages. This is just below the 43% reading seen at the bottom back in October, so things don't currently look great from a breadth perspective. Tomorrow is o...
1,091 Proves Strong Once Again
On a closing basis, the S&P 500 stopped going down right at the 1,091 level, which has acted as key support four times now since last November. Now that the index has found support in the short-term, traders will focus on the 50-day moving average as t...
