Wednesday, October 15, 2014

How to Know the Bottom: New Lows To Disappear

This struck me as something worth passing on.
For readers without access to a Bloomberg terminal the Dow Jones Stock Market Data Center has the info, probably delayed but close enough: With the DJIA down 216 at 16098 and the S&P down 32 at 1845 the new 52-week lows are running at 525.

From SafeHaven Sat, Oct 11, 2014:
The good news is:
• This period of weakness should end soon.
The negatives Several years ago a reporter asked a Fed governor (I think it might have been Donald Kohn) if he thought QE had been successful. The Fed governor replied that it (QE) had been successful because the dollar was down and the stock market up. This statement was revealing because it was an explicit admission that, among QE objectives, were manipulation of the equity and forex markets.

The chart below, using FastTrack data, covers the past year showing the S&P 500 in red and the dollar index in green plotted on log scales. Correlation over the previous 21 trading days is shown in black. Dashed vertical lines have been drawn on the 1st trading day of each month. Dashed horizontal lines have been drawn at 25% increments of the correlation indicator.

The Fed has been tapering QE since last spring and the effect is becoming noticeable, the dollar is up and the stock market is down. I wonder when they will panic and announce the next round of QE.
Last week new lows remained at threatening levels every day and finished the week at the highest levels seen since March of 2009.

It will be easy to tell when this decline is over because new lows will disappear and by that I mean decline to less than 40 on the NYSE and less than 70 on the NASDAQ for at least 5 consecutive days....MORE