For those of you thing that today's rally is for real and the down spell is broken, I'd like you to take a look at my charts at either of
timbur.net
www3.sympatico.ca
which Tim and Richard have generously posted on their web pages. These charts show the relationship between the cumulative 4 weeks new highs-new lows and the SP500.
Even though I have shown the data only for the 90s, I looked at it till 1986 and the relationship still holds; You cannot have a bull market while the cumulative graph is underperforming the index for an extended period of time. Even though I don't have the full data for the rest of this century, I have good reasons to believe that this relationship should have held all along. This is not some mumbo-jumbo TA voodoo at work here; these graphs represent the fundamentals of the market internals.
As I've pointed out before, there have been only 16 times this century that there has been such a great divergence between the major averages and the new highs. In 14 of those cases the market had at the *minimum* a 10% drop within weeks. The other two cases were the rallies in 1929 and 1971 which were followed by the Big Crash and the Big Bear market. Today, even as the market is soaring, the new lows are still surpassing the new highs.
I find it likely that we are in a similar situation as that 1966~1969 in which the nifty fifty went to the sky while the rest of the market aimlessly wondered. Ultimately the nifty fifty droped by more than 80% during the next few years. There is however a healthy way out for the market; for that to happen, the major averages should go nowhere for a few months, while the secondary stocks surge to catch up, thus bringing the bull market's internals to a healthy pattern. As a weak condition for continuation of the bull market in a healthy manner, I am willing to forego the "surpass the SP500" condition for the chart and settle for a buy signal based on my own indicator at the bottom window of the last graph. As you can see, the bottom seems to be away for now.
Good luck to all,
Sun Tzu
PS it's been pointed out that the first graph on Tim's page cannot be enlarged. Tim has offered to fix that tonight. This is not a big issue since that first graph is just to give a bird's view of the very long term picture (SP500 Vs. Hi-Lo). You can see the enlarged image at Richard's if you are in a rush. The other two pictures work fine on Tim's and are more important. |
