Transportation starting to gain strength and also close to breakout

Short-term US Equity trends are bullish and likely begin to accelerate higher into mid-October before finding much resistance.  Despite the bearish seasonality trends, it’s hard to be too negative on recent price action, which combined with rising momentum and above-average bullish breadth, necessitates a bullish stance into October.  (While Banks, Biotech, and Small, Mid-caps have been under pressure, Chinese Equities, Industrials, Materials and most importantly, Technology have rallied back sharply.)  Moreover, triangle patterns have been exceeded to the upside for SPX, and DJIA, and NASDAQ has begun to claw back quickly given Semiconductor stock strength, and now lies within striking distance of its own all-time highs.  Overall, without evidence of any serious technical damage, it’s difficult turning too negative on US equity markets. 

Reasons for Optimism:

  1. Technical structure- S&P and DJIA recently broke out of triangle patterns and have trended higher following their move to new all-time high territory.
  2. Momentum has turned more positive- MACD is positive on a daily, weekly (as of this week) and monthly basis, while RSI is not overbought.
  3. Breadth has improved in recent weeks – Percentage of SPX names above their 200-day moving average is now close to 80%.  While short-term breadth has tailed off a bit in the last two weeks, longer-term breadth remains quite constructive.
  4. Sentiment has still not reached complacent and/or speculative territory that normally would be associated with a market top.
  5. Short-term S&P Cycles show positive slope into October expiration before some consolidation into the month of November.
  6. Technology snapback- Technology, which represents S&P’s largest sector weighting by percentage, has rallied back sharply at a time when many had written this sector off.  Key stocks within SPX and QQQ like AAPL, NVDA, META all show very constructive technical charts which make it difficult to avoid these stocks, and by extension, to avoid the market.    Heading into Friday, Tech still had the best performance of any one of the Equal-weighted sectors for the past week, ahead of Materials, Discretionary and Industrials.
  7. China stimulus- The rally in Chinese Equities has been a positive influence towards many US Sectors this past week, helping Materials stocks as well as Airlines within Transportation, and Casino names within Consumer Discretionary.  It’s not wrong to say that China strength has indirectly helped to jumpstart a few of the US sectors that had been lagging and started to rise quickly just at a time when FXI began its sharp rally.
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