Is the Market Getting Too Technical?

Today is Groundhog Day. Are we going to feel like we’re back in 2021, when it was all tech and nothing else? I’m not sure yet. Wednesday was a bit of that in that the move was concentrated in tech, but so far it wasn’t tech at the expense of everything else. If we go back to an either/or market, where tech rallies at the expense of everything else, it will be bearish, but so far it has only been a day here or a day there where the concentration is in tech. It’s not just if the concentration is in tech, but if it is tech at the expense of everything else. We will know that it is tech at the expense of everything else if new highs falter, but on Wednesday they expanded. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq saw the most new highs in a year. Expansion of new highs is what I wanted to see — and we got it. That now sets the bar. If we see the market rally more and new highs contract, then we’ll know it’s all tech at the expense of everything else. Bread was good, but not nearly as good as it was on Tuesday. But the McClellan Summation Index is still rising. It will now take a net differential of negative 2,800 advancers minus decliners on the NYSE to halt the rise. Keep in mind we entered Wednesday with that number at negative 2,300 so we didn’t add a huge cushion. We came into the week with the cushion at negative 2,400. And we will be overbought Friday. Let me note that the exact day is not what matters, but the approximate time frame. Beginning Friday, eight of the prior 10 trading days will have seen positive breadth with one of those days a net negative, at negative 120. That’s an awful lot of positive numbers to drop as we head into next week. The intermediate-term oscillator has about another week before it is in the same overbought set up. But you can see the overbought set up coming if we look at the Volume Indicator. It is now at 57%. I think it could go a bit higher but it doesn’t take a chart reader to see how it is heading right into overbought territory. And what of sentiment? It feels like it’s getting giddy, but as of yet I do not have any statistics that say so. Perhaps when the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) survey is released on Thursday we will finally see more bulls than bears, but I want to see the shift. I do think the National Association of Active Investment Managers will show an increase in exposure. I suspect a move in tech is what turns that tide. Get an email alert each time I write an article for Real Money. Click the “+Follow” next to my byline to this article.

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