Pull the trigger with confidence.

Every president wants to have improving jobs numbers, and they all do what they think is necessary and appropriate to achieve that. This includes President Trump, but he is fighting against a more powerful force with a long track record.

It turns out that the sunspot cycle has a very strong correlation to the U.S. unemployment rate (U-3), after one adjustment.  This week's chart compares those two sets of data, with the plot of sunspot numbers shifted forward by 3 years.  The bottom of each... Read More

The Federal Reserve is now doing QE5, although we are not supposed to officially call it that yet.  All four previous rounds of quantitative easing (QE) have been unquestionably bullish for the stock market.  But the same cannot be said for T-Bond prices.

During all 4 previous QE episodes, T-Bond prices have seen a dramatic drop, which also means a rise for long term yields.  So if QE5 is going to unfold in the same way, then we can look forward to higher long term yields on T-Bonds, and... Read More

Recent data from the Investors Intelligence weekly survey of investment advisors and newsletter writers showed a very high bull-bear spread.  That spread is simply the numerical difference between the percentage of respondents classified as bullish versus those who are bearish.  High readings show extreme confidence, which every card-carrying contrarian knows is a sign of a top for stock prices.

But before you go placing any sell orders just based on this one indication, a few caveats are... Read More

The NYSE's daily A-D Line just made a new all-time high on Feb. 4, 2026, which is a statement that liquidity is plentiful.  But just a day later, we have gotten the 3rd Hindenburg Omen within 6 trading days.  This is a message that for all of that supposedly plentiful liquidity, the market has some serious problems.

The late Jim Miekka created the Hindenburg Omen signal back in 1995.  He intended it as an improvement on the late Gerald Appel's "Split Market Sell Signal", which occurred any... Read More

Now that the Fed has cut short term rates several times, we are seeing a further steepening of the yield curve.  It is tough to portray the entirety of changes in the whole yield curve over time, and so I am summarizing it in this week's chart by showing just the spread between 10-year and 3-month Treasury yields. 

The 10y-3m spread does a really cool trick, which this week's chart illustrates.  Changes in that 10y-3m spread draw us a roadmap for what small cap outperformance or... Read More

When technical analysts learn about volume, they are taught that it is useful for helping to confirm (or not) what prices are doing.  This includes hopefully seeing expanding volume to confirm a price breakout.  And a head and shoulders structure should ideally have the heaviest volume on the left shoulder or the head.

For big ETFs like QQQ, it works differently.  As a gross generalization, QQQ volume works as a fairly pure inverse sentiment indication.  High volume is a sign of a bottoming... Read More

We have just seen a new all-time high in the NYSE's daily Advance-Decline (A-D) Line.  It confirms the new highs in the major indices, and that is a really good thing.

Years ago, I undertook a study to see what it means to have a new high in the A-D Line.  In order to increase my sample size, I specified that it had to be just a new 3-year high instead of all time, and then I looked at what the max drawdown was in the SP500 over the succeeding 3 months.  The recent decades' results are... Read More

We are still in the "best 6 months of the year", due to last until early May 2026, and so the current uptrend ought to continue.  But we should also expect a meaningful dip this month, based on the DJIA's Annual Seasonal Pattern (ASP) shown in this week's chart.

I created this ASP by chopping up the daily data into 1-year chunks, restating their value for each year to a starting value of 1.00, then averaging them together as the percentage change from that starting value rather than the... Read More