Friday Surprise – March 26, 2021

The S&P 500 closed on a new high, gaining 1 ½% in the final 1.5 hours to do it. The entire week was up 0.1% before that. It was a very odd run up. Chinese stocks were getting smashed all week due to new data requests from the SEC. Stocks like TME (Tencent) traded 300 Million shares instead of 17 million! Leaders in Communication Services were sacked rapidly on the week. Some of my scans produced bizarre results compared to the S&P’s positive return on the week. As an example, over 1100 stocks were down more than 5%. Only 120 stocks were up 5% or more. By any stretch to have the market close up with that type of backdrop is truly odd. Just add that to the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal. Weird week.

Once again, the NASDAQ under performed the S&P 500. The real problem with that is trying to figure out if it’s ready to accelerate higher after a six-week pullback. The vaccination data for the USA continues to get more promising. America expects to have 200 million people vaccinated within the first hundred days of the new president.

Globally we also saw more weakness. Asian countries as well as commodity countries didn’t fare as well as the US. The exception would be Australia which was up on the week. The US made a new high on Friday on the S&P 500, but anytime we test the previous high we need to be careful to see if we have enough strength to hold it. I will be watching carefully. Even in nature as the picture shows, testing a prior high can lead to failure.

The transports and industrial’s look extremely bullish. That should be enough to say just get long. But the top performing areas of the market were all the defensive ones. Staples, utilities, healthcare, REIT’s.

The Aussie dollar and the emerging market currency ETF (CEW) both broke trend lines. EEM also broke below it’s trend line with a bounce Friday afternoon to close right on the line. Not a good look for commodities. The US Dollar pushed meaningfully higher.

Summary: The bizarre price action this week makes it really hard to figure out what’s going on. Defensive sectors leading, while stocks like Tesla and Shopify break up trends. Doesn’t sound bullish at all. I got more buy signals on gold charts this week, carrying over from my gold trade ideas last week. Oddly gold and silver miners were weaker. Let’s hit the charts.

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