Friday, April 17, 2009

Ceiling Reached

The S&P has kissed the 875 level I have been writing about. Some would say harping or chicken littling but there it is on paper. As a colleague said, now we'll see if technicians rule the market.

Since the technicals behind this will be a major focus of Monday's newsletter I cannot go into them here. Subscribers would not be pleased. But if you've been reading my column you know what they are.

And what's with the 62 new 52-week lows on the NYSE today. Hmmm, new high and six straight weeks in teh black but the news lows have grown.

9 comments:

Paul O'Cuana said...

I think you have this one right on the money.

What I don't understand are those who draw a line from the Election Day highs to the early January highs and then celebrate a breakout at roughly 850 as if we're going to the moon.

Well, anyway, I think you're right that 875 from the late January early February highs makes a lot more sense.

Paul O'Cuana

bmbull said...

Not sure where you got your number for new lows on Friday, Michael. WSJ.com shows only 3.

Although, if you were to include all the short ETFs that are sinking to new lows, I can see where you'd get closer to that 62!

Michael Kahn said...

BMB,

Yahoo finance has 63 new lows final for Friday. Barron's Online has 3. However, there are plenty of new 52 week highs on Yahoo, too, so I don;t know what they are using.

Michael Kahn said...

Paul,

I wrote in the newsletter that that trendline was there but did not describe the action.

bmbull said...

Well, from the numbers I've seen, Yahoo appears to be the outlier here.

Don't know how they come up with that number.

Amalan said...

I have found data problems at Yahoo in the past, and when I wrote them a while back, they said they merely publish the data they get from Reuters and that they'll forward my feedback to the reporting agency. You can see other agencies listed if you pull up a chart and go to the very bottom of the page.

As for the ceiling - I watched the market (SP500) do the backing and filling around the 815 area, and only based on that I thought it could go up to 900 or so, but the last 2 days have been very week. Either the ceiling was truly reached (waiting for a strong gap down) or more backing and filling will occur in the low 800s.

Interesting thing is that the last few days started with futures in the red, but somehow the market ended higher at the end of the day.

MrWave4 said...

Hi Michael,

I follow your very informative column in Barron's on a weekly basis without fail.

I agree the new lows for NYSE dont look right according to WSJ data(see below).

The Advance/Decline ratio is still 2:1 on the NYSE & 1.7: 1 on the Nasdaq. Once we turnaround at the 875 level & start heading down, would we see the A/D ratio's flip over ?
Cheers



Markets Diary (from WSJ)
Issues NYSE Nasdaq Alternext
Advances 2,046 1,704 325
Declines 1,027 1,069 222
Unchanged 91 142 55


Issues at
New Highs 6 24 2
New Lows 3 1 1

Michael Kahn said...

In the words of Ronald Reagan, "trust but verify."

I got the first part down. Now to work on the second.

MrWave4 said...

I can wait to see the follow up article to "The Bear is hiding around the corner" ?