We have been repeatedly noting that the equity-only put-call ratio charts are at multi-year lows. The charts on the right show visual evidence of this.
These are very long-term put-call ratio charts, extending back 25 years in the case of the standard ratio (upper chart) and 20 years in the case of the weighted ratio (lower chart).
The CBOE will begin trading Bitcoin Futures with Sunday night’s trading (December 10th). These are the basic facts about the contract, as taken from the website (the CME futures begin trading on Dec 18th).
Despite some selling early in the week (that seemed to be more of a reaction to a short-term overbought condition than to any real change of trend) $SPX still remains well above its rising 20-day moving average. It has closed above that MA every day except one since August 28th! As I've said before, that is impressive. So the trend of the $SPX chart is bullish, and that is the best intermediate-term indicator that we have.
The post-Thanksgiving seasonal period got off to a rousing start perhaps too rousing. The $SPX chart remains positive as long as it holds above support. The first support level is at 2600, which is the recent highs and also near today's (Friday's) lows.
Traders are abuzz with the seemingly absurd fact that $VIX is up strongly today (and up for four days in a row), even though the market has risen strongly over that time – and is blasting explosively higher today.
Forget why this is happening. Can this be sustained? The simple is answer is “yes,” of course. Anything can happen – and probably will – is an old adage on Wall Street (and in life). But has this ever happened over a lengthy period of time? It certainly has.
The stock market has signaled that whatever was holding it back for the past couple of weeks ("correction" would be too strong of a word) is over. $SPX and all the other major indices have broken out to new closing and intraday all-time highs. This includes the previously-lagging Russell 2000 Index ($RUT, IWM).
The Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. brings about several positive seasonal patterns that are generally worth playing. A number of years ago, we used to trade these separately, but then it became apparent that one generally “morphs” into the other, and so in today’s world, these three systems are really blended into one. The three systems, in their original format, were:
$SPX remains in a bullish trend, despite breaking one support level this week -- a level which it quickly recovered. There is support at 2557 (Wednesday's low, from which prices have rallied over 30 points in a day). Below that, there is support at 2545 (the October lows), and then the major support at 2510 -- the September highs, and the area which launched the current leg of this long market rally.
As noted on page 1, a divergence has developed between $SPX (and the other major indices) – which have all been making new all-time highs – and the Russell 2000 ($RUT, IWM), which has not and has even broken down.
This has been a successful seasonal trade in many years, and the last two years were the second and third best years in our history. We have used this in 23 of the past 24 years – skipping only 1995, for reasons which I no longer recall.
In this trade, we buy RBOB Gasoline futures and sell Heating Oil futures. This is the simplest way to establish the spread, eschewing futures options and ETF options – the options are just too illiquid in the February contracts, which is what we use for this spread.
