Market direction.
I run scans on my tcnet to see how many sectors (239 total) are either breaking up or down based on several periods taken off the daily charts. Often you will see a bullish to bearish tendency in this area, something like 20 sectors breaking out to 8 or 12 breaking down; sometimes it's the reverse. This morning's numbers are, since I've been doing this, somewhat astounding.
Breakdowns (sectors breaking down out of a 20 day period) to breakouts (sectors breaking out of a 20 day period):
72:1
When I look at longer periods I get bearish ratios 43:1 and 37:1. And that one sector which is breaking out?
It's that mighty engine of the US economy: Toy & Hobby Stores.
It's also interesting to compare this to where the indices are today: Dow, NDX, Naz all down fractionally. OEX OSX SOX all down fractionally at this hour, but the sector count is miserable.
There is one big gainer in the indices, though: QQV, which measures volatility on the QQQQ's, is up sharply: 6%. The VIX is up almost 3% today as well.
On further sorting of these 72 breakdown sectors, I'm looking for the 5 weakest sectors: paper products, trucking, surety & title insurance, discount stores and medical appliances.
Selecting a ticker and an entry are all that's left. YELL is one to look at, as are IP and KMB.
Kb |
