Technical Market Report

The good news is:
The Russell 2000 (R2K), Nasdaq composite (OTC) and the S&P 500 (SPX) all closed at all time highs last Wednesday.?

?The Negatives

New highs failed to confirm the new all time index highs.
NYSE Volume is at its lowest level in more than 3 Years.

The first chart covers the past 6 months showing the OTC in blue and a 10% trend (19 day EMA) of Nasdaq new highs (OTC NH) in green.  Dashed vertical lines have been drawn on the 1st trading day of each month.

The next chart is similar to the one above one except it shows the SPX in red and NY NH, in green, has been calculated with NYSE data.
 NY NH also failed to confirm the new index high. 

The chart above doesn’t look too bad.
The chart below is similar to the chart above except it looks back 9 months.

In this chart the non confirmation is pretty extreme.

The next chart covers the past 3 years showing the SPX in red and a 5% trend of total NYSE volume in grey. Dashed vertical lines have been drawn on the 1st trading day of each year.

 NYSE volume is at its lowest level in over 3 years.  

The Positives

New lows continued to disappear.

The next chart covers the past 6 months showing the OTC in blue and a 10% trend of NASDAQ new lows (OTC NL) in brown.  OTC NL has been plotted on an inverted Y axis so diminishing new lows move the indicator upward (up is good).

OTC NL continued to move sharply upward last week.

The next chart is similar to the one above except it shows the SPX in red and NY NL has been calculated with NYSE data.

NY NL is close to its lowest level of the past 6 months.

The next chart covers the past 6 months showing the OTC in blue and a 40% trend (4 day EMA) of NASDAQ new highs divided by new highs + new lows (OTC HL Ratio), in red.  Dashed horizontal lines have been drawn at 10% levels for the indicator; the line is solid at the 50%, neutral, level.
OTC HL Ratio leveled off at a high level, finishing the week at a strong 82%.

The next chart is similar to the one above except it shows the SPX in red and NY HL Ratio, in blue, has been calculated with NYSE data.
NY HL Ratio also leveled off finishing the week at a comfortable 71%.

Seasonality
Next week includes the first 4 trading days of September during the 2nd year of the Presidential Cycle.  The tables below show the daily change, on a percentage basis for that period.  

OTC data covers the period from 1963 to 2018 while SPX data runs from 1928 to 2018.  There are summaries for both the 2nd year of the Presidential Cycle and all years combined.

Average returns for the coming week have been modestly positive.