Weekly Stock Market Commentary 2/6/2015

By Lawrence G. McMillan

The stock market has had a strong week. Even so, $SPX remains within the general confines of the 1990-2065 trading range, on a closing basis. We still await a breakout from that range in order to establish an intermediate-term trend.

In something of a surprise, both equity-only put-call ratios rolled over to buy signals after Tuesday's trading this week. The computer programs that we use to monitor these charts were right on top of this new signal.

Market breadth has been jumping back and forth daily, generating a lot of signals that were quickly canceled or overridden. At the current time, both breadth oscillators are on buy signals.

Volatility indices have declined this week. Most important, though, was the third $VIX "spike peak" buy signal in less than a month (the most recent one came on Monday, February 2nd). Each one has occurred with $SPX near 1990, and each one has resulted in $SPX climbing to the top of the trading range above 2060.

In summary, there are a lot of "if's" right now, and they mostly begin with "if $SPX can or cannot break out over 2065." A move above there will likely spur a retest of the all-time highs rather quickly. But the last two times that $SPX was this high, it seemed like an upside breakout was imminent and it wasn't. So we will wait and see.

This Market Commentary is an abbreviated version of the commentary featured in The Option Strategist Newsletter.