Technical Market Report

The good news is:

The bottom, when it is reached, will be easy to identify.

?The Negatives

There were huge numbers of new lows all week long.

About 30 years ago I did research on new highs and new lows.
One of the characteristics I found was: When there are a lot of new lows (defined then as 250) there was always a retest of the price low. In 1990 and 2008 there were multiple retests and the retests usually occurred within 2 months of the previous low. In 1990 there were about half as many issues traded as there are now and the increase has been nearly all fixed income issues.

The President’s working group on financial markets (AKA the Plunge Protection Team) was created by Ronald Regan in 1998. It is made up of the Treasury sectary, and the chairs of the Federal Reserve, SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The purpose of the PPT is to manipulate the markets in order to prevent another crash like we had in 1987. It would not surprise me to see the PPT take action in the next few days.

The first chart covers the past 6 months showing the Nasdaq composite (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 numbers of new lows move the indicator upward (up is good).

When a bottom has been reached new lows disappear and OTC NL will head sharply upward.

No sign of a bottom here.

The next chart is similar to the one above except it shows the S&P 500 (SPX) in red and NY NL, in blue, has been calculated with NYSE data.

No bottom here either.

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

At 5.3% NY HL Ratio cannot go much lower.