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Weekly Market Update -- where did all the bears go?

Two months of pessimism almost completely erased in one week!

That's what a melt-up rally can do. When I wrote my last Weekly Market Update a couple of weeks ago I said that hints of a bottom were accumulating. I anticipated a basing process before a significant rally would take place. I guess I was too pessimistic myself. Let's see where we are now...

The view from Alert HQ --

For those readers who are new to TradeRadar or who don't remember what this is all about, the data for the following charts is generated from our weekly Alert HQ process. We scan roughly 6200 stocks and ETFs each weekend and gather the statistics presented below.

In this first chart below we count the number of stocks above various exponential moving averages and count the number of moving average crossovers, as well. We then plot the results against a chart of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY).


What is so surprising here is that we now see roughly two thirds of all stocks are now above their 50-day exponential moving averages (EMA). It was less than 1/3 just a couple of weeks ago.

We also see the number of stocks whose 20-day EMA is above the 50-day EMA has begun to decisively turn up but not explosively. This suggests this rally has room to run though it may not be a straight line up.

The next chart provides our trending analysis. It looks at the number of stocks in strong up-trends or down-trends based on Aroon analysis.


It's a little hard to see at the right side of this chart, but the number of stocks that are showing bullish trends (the yellow line) has jumped up to roughly 35% of all the stocks we track. It was recently less than 1/6 of all stocks. Given that Aroon is a somewhat slow-changing indicator, the speed at which this has happened is surprising.

It is easier to see the red line on the right side of the chart which indicates that the number of stocks in well-defined bearish trends has now fallen drastically and could soon approach the typical cycle lows where it could bounce around a bit if the market continues to move higher.

Conclusion --

There are many people commenting on blogs who say this rally was just short-covering and that soon major averages will fall decisively below their 200-day moving averages.

I don't agree.

Though we are likely to see pullbacks along the way (next week's jobs and payroll data could be a downer and we still have the dramas in Greece and Washington continuing to play out against their respective deadlines), it looks to me like the market has started another bullish UP cycle. Furthermore, we have earnings season starting in a week or so. If companies are able to post halfway decent numbers despite the recent economic soft patch, investors could breathe a sigh of relief and continue to push stocks higher.

"Buy the dips" is an overused phrase but this may the time when it might actually pay to do so.

Disclosure: none

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