Lawrence G. McMillan was recently a guest on senior MarketWatch columnist Chuck Jaffe's MoneyLife podcast on May 12 at 12:30 PM. Larry's interview was a part of the "Technical Difficulties" segment where he discussed the current state of the market. Listen to the interview below.
Recording Details
MoneyLife Interview
Wednesday, May 12th
12:30 PM Eastern Time
The Standard & Poors 500 Index ($SPX) bounced strongly off of support at 2040 last Friday. That level remains strong support, with resistance at 2110.
Equity-only put-call ratios rolled over to sell signals last week, and while there was some flirtation with a new buy signal by the standard ratio (Figure 2), both of these put-call ratios are back on sell signals once again.
Let’s discuss cumulative breadth for a moment. Cumulative breadth is merely the running total of daily advances minus declines.
Bulls took charge early yesterday and kept the upward pressure on all day long. The strength of the rally changed the status of several indicators as well. So the 2040 area is reinforced as the major support level of $SPX once again. The brief probe below that level, for a few cents and for a few minutes last Friday, was not enough to qualify as a break of that support level. It’s unclear if the bears are going to get another chance for that breakout anytime soon.
In this past weekend's Striking Price column in Barron's, Steve Sears noted that investment research goliath Morningstar recently created a new "options" investing category in their fund listings. Mr. Sears believes this new cateogry signifies that options have now become "part of the matinstream investment landscsape." With options trading volume alomost doubling in the last 10 years, we'd have to agree with Mr.
A "stealth" correction has been underway for a couple of weeks. Most people would be mildly surprised to realize that $SPX has fallen more than 60 points from its recent highs near 2110, just over two weeks ago. The decline has been steady and unspectacular, accompanied by few actual sell signals. In other words, it's been a minor correction so far.
$SPX continues to display support at 2040, but a violation of that level would be bearish.
It’s a bit hard to realize, because it’s happened so quietly, but $SPX has fallen more than 60 points from its highs of two weeks ago. It’s done this without causing panic, although some negativity has certainly arisen in our indicators. $SPX has still not taken out the important support level at 2040. If it does that, a more severe correction will unfold.
Last week, the CBOE announced the launch of its new dedicated paid option data site titled the CBOE Livevol Data Shop. The new site is quite user friendly and allows one to customize their data package based on their needs. For example, a customer could purchase daily end-of-day option data including all of the greeks for not just all stocks, but instead just a select few. The prices reflect your preferences and can cost as little as $6 per month per underlying.
This article was originally featured in the 3/27/16 edition of The Option Strategist Newsletter.
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that the highest “stocks only” breadth oscillator reading in history had taken place. In fact, the top three readings of all time occurred on March 3rd, 4th, and 7th of this month (March, 2016). In addition, the 15th and 17th most extreme readings of all time occurred on March 2nd and March 11th, respectively. We wanted to study the other extreme readings to see what happened after those. Is this a significant longer-term indicator, or is it just indicative of the fact that short-term momentum is strong? The complete "Top 20" is shown in Table 1.
