The key to whether the market is bullish or bearish is $SPX support at 4370. Yesterday (August 19th), $SPX traded right down to that level and bounced from there again. That is the third time in less than a month that $SPX has bounced off of that level. Hence, it is valid and substantial support. If it gives way, there will likely be surge of selling. But as long as that support at 4370 holds, the $SPX chart is still bullish, with moving averages trending upward.
Despite deteriorating internals in the market, $SPX plowed ahead to register a new all-time high on 13 of 14 consecutive trading days. That streak was interrupted yesterday.
Leadership once again is in the $SPX Index, although the NASDAQ Composite and the NASDAQ-100 ($NDX; QQQ) are strong as well. Since the $SPX chart is our primary indicator, we retain a "core" bullish position as long as $SPX holds above support: 4260 (the early June highs), 4165, and 4060 the latter two being the twice-tested lows of June and May, respectively.
When $SPX broke out to new all-time highs in early June, it seemed labored, and that breakout quickly faded. But now, in late June and early July, $SPX has moved to new all-time highs with more authority -- having closed at a new all-time high for the sixth trading day in a row.
The broad market ($SPX) has failed to convincingly break out to a new high, and now it is back below the old (early May) highs of 4238. A close below 4190 would indicate to me that the attempted upside breakout had failed.
Despite recent market weakness over the past four days, the equity-only put-call ratios remain on buy signals. The standard ratio (Figure 2) flattened out yesterday, but the weighted ratio continues to drop. These ratios will remain on buy signals as long as they are declining.
ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) recently gave both a McMillan Volatility Bands and Put-Call Ratio buy signal and broke it's recent downtrend; therefore we expect higher prices for the etf. See the charts below.
Normally, we have “Naked Put Writes” in this section of the newsletter. But with the explosion in implied volatility and stock price in several “short squeeze” stocks (or “meme stocks,” if you prefer: a meme stock is any publicly traded company that is benefitting from the fact that investors are using social media to drive interest in the company's shares).
The following table shows the current status of the most expensive of these in terms of implied volatility:
The stock market has run into considerable resistance at the top of the trading range, as it appears to be consolidating for a violent move either an upside breakout to new all-time highs, or a failure at the top of the range, leading to a swift retracement to the bottom of the range (4060). Since May 24th, $SPX has not closed above 4208 nor below 4192. That is an extremely narrow range, considering the volatility that has been displayed since February 2020.
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX) made a new all-time high on May 7th. Since then, a correction has been underway, and there have been several times in the last week when I'm sure that both the bulls and the bears thought they had taken control. There were two rather violent declines, both terminating near the 4060 level, so that is now the first support level. Both of those declines were followed by furious rallies back to the slightly declining 20-day Moving Average. A breakout from the current range should see follow-through in that same direction.
