Tuesday, February 14, 2012

SPY/SPX Update

This is a longer term update with more charts so I have only completed it for the SPY/SPX because if I captured all of the same charts for the other 3 averages, you'd have 28 charts and I wouldn't be able to get it done before the close.

 The SPY 2 min chart today is in line or showing confirmation of the move down, this confirmation is something we have rarely seen on the moves up, which would indicate that the smart money has been using the rally to sell/sell short in to. Price is always deceiving and Wall Street is always working far in advance. The entirety of these charts are "part" of the reason I believe this is a bear market rally and they are dangerous. Again, if everyone knows it, it's not worth knowing, the price chart alone is something everyone knows and there's no edge to knowing what everyone else knows.

 SPY 2 min longer term has really ben negative since last Thursday and is now leading negative for at least the 7 days seen on this chart and likely many more.

 The 5 min chart shows confirmation up, confirmation down.

 The 10 min chart also went very negative last Thursday, it showed some accumulation (for the gap fill yesterday) late Friday, it has been negative ever since and it too is leading negative at a new low as far back as my history will show, 7 days.

 The 30 min chart is where the real trouble is and has been, this is why I have thought (along with other indications) that we are seeing a bear market rally that will end badly. When you see how negative this chart is, it may seem out of place or unbelievable, but consider the Credit/Risk charts that show equally as bad or worse dislocations between the market and the EUR/USD, commodities, rates, and Credit. When you put them altogether, this chart is much more believable as we have confirmation from wildly unrelated indicators.

Finally, a long term picture of the SPX showing the 2007/2008 top, 3C went positive before the market at the 2009 bottom and called accumulation. 3C stayed mostly in line until QE2 when averages were artificially manipulated higher, thus the deep negative divergence as once again, QE2 created an illusion of real strength, but in reality it was just manipulation of the market. Presently, the depth of the daily divergence is horrible, worse then most every single top I've studies over the last century, QE2 is mostly to thank for creating higher market prices with no underlying support or strength. In my opinion and as we saw with consecutive months of insider selling that was more lopsided then any other time in the history of the market, QE2 was a gift to Wall Street from the F_E_D, it did nothing for the economy except squeeze margins in every industry, arguably it did more harm then good, except for the bankers on Wall Street and the CEOs who were able to sell their stock at high prices, thus the F_E_D's gift to Wall Street as you cannot distinguish between politicians and Wall Street, look at how many former Goldman Sach's employees serve in the F_E_D and the White House. Look at Greece where a technocrat was NOT elected, but placed in power by the Troika to get Greece to go along, and where did he come from? Goldman Sachs.

New Indicator, new insights...

This is a custom cumulative indicator I just threw together real quick, the reason why? Because very rarely do we see "V" shaped reversals either up or down, however, I was thinking, what if the reversal period is actually building before our eyes and we don't recognize it?

So here's what I created, first I created a code that tells us what the price percent change is each day and since the moves have been so small lately, +.22% or something along that rather then what we use to see as an average move of 1%, I created the indicator to move up 1 notch if the close was greater then .25% and to move down if the gain was less then +.25%. A change of .25% up or down is almost meaningless, we have just seen a string of so many days of small gains that there's more of an illusion of strength then actual strength.

Here's what I came up with...
 The Dow-30

 The NASDQ 100

 Russell 2000-be sure to compare the indicator relative to where prices are now and where they were at similar levels in June/July of 2011

And the S&P-500

Next, I created the same indicator, except it will move up on any close above 0% (even .0001%) and move down on any close below 0%. Since we know that the market has been more interested in creating the illusion of strength by closing higher, but not as concerned with actual strength as we can see by the very low percentage gains, this indicator by itself would move nearly straight up, so I added one more indicator to our custom indicator and that is the Rate of Change. If the market is showing more strength, the white indicator will move up on a positive rate of change, if not, it will move down on the Rat of change decreasing. So as the rally unfolded, we can see the relative strength of it.

 The Dow 30 from a ROC uptrend to a recent downtrend.

 The NASDAQ is the clear winner among the averages, but even its rate of change has dropped off since the start of the uptrend, before it went flat in the middle of the trend.

 The Russell 2000had a positive ROC and then went flat from the early highs to just before the red arrow begins and the trend down.

And the S&P-500

The point of this exercise is not only to show the declining strength of the move up, but that there may not need to be a period of lateral or rounding over and a "V" shaped reversal is not only possible, but more probable (I didn't say highly probable, but more probable).

Credit/Risk Asset Update

I think this layout has been one of the best, most innovative set of indicators we've added to our tool box, furthermore, I think if you ignore the signals here, you are doing so at your own peril. This layout is flashing bright red flags, not the kind that suggest a correction, but the kind that suggest something very ugly is going on beneath the surface where few traders look. As always, what the crowd knows, isn't worth knowing.

 Commodities today seem to be in line with the SPX's performance (SPX is always in green).

 As you can see yesterday, they had no interest in taking part in the SPX's move and remained at the Friday drop lows. This is why we use these charts, they are forward looking, not lagging indicators. A risk on rally should see risk assets like commodities perform, when they don't you see what happens.

 Taking a very long view back to 2010, look how commodities were in a risk on mode with the market at the green arrow, then toward the 2011 top, commodities diverged, they warned that it was a top, they warned before the 16% late July plunge and right now they are at the worst divergence in years, they are warning of something that probably very few of us can appreciate. It may be of benefit to go back and read my Bear Market Rally post from Feb. 5th 2012, the archives are at the right side of the site about half way down.

 High Yield Credit is showing worse relative performance then the SPX today. It gave a warning late yesterday.

 Since the NFP on the 3rd, look at what has been going on in High Yield Credit. Again, this is a RED FLAG.

 Rates, "Equity's magnet" are in sync intraday with the market.

 Over the last few days, since last week through today, they are warning as well, they failed to confirm the market's move up yesterday.

 Longer term, rates warned of the 2011 top and it's break in late July. Right now, they are worse then ever.

 Since 2009, they called the bottom before the market bottomed, called the 2010 consolidation, the 2011 top and are making new lows in this area, in fact historic new lows.

 This is a conversation for another day, but I have mentioned that I believe we will see the first secular bear market in equities of our generation. Note the years on the time frame below.

 For those who still don't think the FX correlation is alive and well, the Euro/Dollar warned yesterday as the market was near its highs. Today the Euro is still underperforming the SPX, another warning.


 Over the last week or so, the Euro called a bottom before equities at the white arrow, again at the white box for yesterday's move and several declines as the market "appeared" strong.

 Longer term, the dislocation is huge, you can see the Euro/FX called the July drop, the October rally highs, and now it is more divergent then ever. This, along with everything else we have seen, strongly suggests this is indeed a bear market rally setting up the bulls for a major fall.


 This is High Yield Corporate Credit, on the 10th, High Yield Credit made the biggest 1-day drop since November. It hasn't added a higher high in weeks and is moving toward new lows.

 Financials are under-performing today, as they warned late yesterday.

 In the white box, financials led the market higher with out-performance, they warned last Thursday before Friday's decline, they warned again yesterday and are now moving to new Post NFP lows.

 Intraday, you can see financials are one of the worst performing industry groups.

If we look at all major groups today, again we see very defensive trade with Financials, Basic Materials, Technology notably, all lower, the only risk on sector performing is Energy. The defensive sectors are in rotation, Healthcare, Utilities, Staples and Industrials to some degree which I assume is a move toward blue chip names.

I borrowed this chart as I can't afford a Bloomberg terminal, but since we have been talking about it the last several days...
Here's the divergence between European Financial Credit and Equities (credit in orange). The Credit market is bigger, it's where smart money plays, not retail and Credit almost always leads equities as smart money is making moves there while equities look like they are just being set up.

Financials

With Financial Credit, both Senior and Subordinated in both Europe and the US taking a turn for the worse and considering Financials recent relative performance (which has been high), it's time to take a closer look at what's going on there.

I consider Financials, Energy and Technology the 3 essential Industry groups, so a change in any one of them is important to see coming.

It also should be noted, that the ECB is gearing up for the second LTRO this week (Long Term Repo Operation in which they take bank assets as collateral for a 3 year, 1% loan) which is expected to be much larger then the first. The idea of the LTRO was that banks in the EU who desperately need to shore up their tier 1 capital as required by mandate, would use the 3 year loan to buy sovereign debt which has been in the recent past, yielding 6-7% in some countries. This is known as a carry trade, unfortunately for Sarkozy who trumpeted how successful the LTRO would be at doing that (being the ECB is banned, just like the F_E_D from participating in direct primary debt auctions), almost all of the money went right back in to the ECB's deposit facility which yields .75%, so banks were taking the money, but rather then financing carry trades (although there have been a few, but far from what was envisioned) they were getting it OUT of the financial system and in to the safety of the ECB's deposit facility to..... you probably guessed it as it was predictable, to shore up their tier 1 capital base rather then issuing new shares at depressed prices. The important thing to note (and EU financial institutions have been trumpeting this like a badge if honor, making sure everyone knows they didn't take LTRO cash) is the banks that did take the LTRO cash are being hit 4x harder then the ones that did not. This too was predictable as we saw the same thing happen in the US to banks that borrowed from the F_E_D's discount window. The market assumes that the banks taking the money are the ones in the worst shape and probably accurately. As the ECB has lowered collateral standards below the last LTRO's single A rating, the next take up is expected to be enormous, however with the banks who took the money being punished in the market, it will be interesting to see just how big the take up is vs. consensus. Also what we should be paying attention to is the Deposit facility and how much of the cash goes in to it, Greece has become a real problem for the banks and I suspect they will choose to hold onto the cash rather then finance carry trades as Greece becomes an "unknown, unknown". Furthermore, the Greek PSI deal, if it gets done, could set some very dangerous precedents for bond buyers, especially now that they realize the ECB will not participate in any write down. This means the more debt the ECB holds of any particular sovereign, the bigger the private creditor potential write down will be when Portugal, Spain, Italy, or Ireland seek to get equal and fair treatment and look to have their debt restructured.

It may sound a little complicated, but if you read it once more, I think the gist will be clear. It's a pretty simple market dynamic that as always comes down to the balance between fear and greed and there's no doubt that fear is the stronger of the two drivers of the market; just look at the 2003-2007 bull market, the bulk of the gains and then some were erased in 8 months, after taking 5 years to build them.

On to Financials...


 Today financials are an under-performer as you can see on this 1 min sector rotation chart as compared to yesterday.

 Longer term they have come in and out of rotation a couple of time, but most recently they have been in rotation since December or so.


Starting from the short end and working to the longer timeframes...

 This shows, much like the market update, late day distribution yesterday in financials, much like what we saw last Thursday afternoon before Friday's drop.

 On the close up 2 min chart we see the same negative leading divergence in to afternoon trade and in a flat environment.

 Longer term, it seems there's been distribution since the NFP on Feb. 3rd, I suppose either smart money didn't believe the ridiculous and arbitrary seasonal adjustment or treated it as "sell the news" XLF is now leading negative on the short term going back before the Non-Farm Payrolls.

 The same is seen on the 5 min chart with a head fake at the yellow box, which was also the top for financials.

 The longer term charts have shown a deep and long leading negative divergence on this 15 min chart.

 The same on the 30 min, although this does show an accumulation and mark up cycle before distribution.

And on this hourly chart.

3C usually responds to these divergences within days, (during the early Aug to late September 2011 choppy market, 3C responded so quickly that the MP made 80%)  there have only been a few times when they went on and I only see it in major market once or twice a year, it happened at the end of the G.W. Bush administration after a 5+ year rally in oil that took it from $20 a barrel to over $145 a barrel, that divergence went on for a while and started somewhere around 3 months before Crude topped and then saw an 80% decline in 7 months, bringing crude down to the low $30 area. The same happened with the US dollar in 2008 and 2009, both runs higher made significantly more gains then when the divergence first started, so if you had bought when the divergence first started and sat through the drawdown, you still made huge money (considering the Dollar Index's beta). It's happened with several stocks as well, but in all of these major divergences, they have accompanied major moves that went well beyond where the divergences first started.

Early Market Update

I try to separate early from regular market updates as the early action is usually full of games to take advantage of limit orders/stops, etc placed by retail that has to head off to work, in fact many professional traders don't even pay attention to the market until after 11:00 a.m. with the pros really coming in to the market right around 3:30 through the close as the day traders tend to exit around 3:30-3:45.

However, yesterday's closing activity had a lot in common with Thursday's closing activity before the Friday gap down.

We already know volume and the Price/Volume relationships from yesterday were bunk, so the way I see it, yesterday was a noise day that was only good for filling a gap.

 The DIA, note the dates. Last Thursday it went leading negative in to the close and Friday we saw the fall. Yesterday was already leading negative,  but got worse in to the close.

 The same is true of the QQQ

As well as the SPY.

Actual Crude Futures / CL

The actual Crude Futures seem to verify the USO readings.

 This is CL (Crude Futures) yesterday

This is overnight and in to the open.

USO Update

I haven't seen the final verdict on the Crude Future trading halt imposed by the CME as of yet, but NANEX that does great work in tracking algos verified there was an algo running that stuffed so many quotes in to /CL that it caused the memory on the software to fill up and halted the day's trade for 75 minutes. That being the case, it looks like manipulation of the market by some predatory HFT, so I'm not taking the break above the channel too seriously as of yet, being it occurred under intense algo activity that was most likely predatory in going after another big player or a bunch of them. We saw something like this happen several months back when I believe it was the NYSE had so much quote stuffing that the system reached capacity and had to be reset during the trading day rather then overnight as each order carries a number and there is a finite limit.

 With this channel being so obvious in one of the biggest markets out there, it was only a matter of time before the algos took advantage of it, whether for volume rebates, whether predatory activity upon finding an iceberg, who knows, but the channel/trend were too clean and obvious for it not to be shaken out.

 The short term 3C is leading negative today and was negative yesterday, which seems to indicate this wasn't accumulation of oil, rather an algo stuffing quotes.

 Here's a close up of the same chart, now leading negative.

 The 5 min chart also leading negative.

This is why I preferred the 2-day Trend Channel which would have a stop at $38.96 ON the CLOSE.

Yesterday' Internals and Overnight

Yesterday's internals were pretty much what I expected to find with a few surprises. As I mentioned yesterday, the trade was insignificant; it didn't do anything more then fill a gap which is about what we expect to see about 90% of the time, so it wasn't special in even that.

Volume dropped off on the NYSE to new lows for a non-holiday trading day that stretch beyond a decade and ES volume just missed multi-year new lows and was off by 30% of its 50-day moving average of volume.

The Cats and Dogs were the leaders again yesterday (which is usually telling us something in and of itself as the C&D trades tend to pop at the end of a bull run. The top 15 highest percent gainers were all Cats and Dogs and 19 of the 25 highest percent gainers were all Cats and Dogs. I didn't look through the usual 150 other then to skim through and saw a majority of gainers were again, Cats and Dogs.

The Dominant Price Volume Relationship should come as no surprise...

 Dow -30 Components


 NASDAQ 100 Components


S&P-500

At just about 50% in all of the major averages, Price Up / Volume Down was the winner, which is also the most bearish of the 4 possible relations and even more so making a 10+ year low in volume.

Even the top performing Sub-Industry groups were generally recent under-performers, including:

Consumer Services, Paper and Paper Products, Drug Delivery, Pollution and Treatment Control, Metal Fabrication, Drug Related Products, REIT Hotel/Motel, Small Tools and Accessories, Beverage and Brewers and Diagnostic Substances.

Credit underperformed as did risk assets, there was simply nothing to get excited about in the internals. Crude trade was interesting on the CME halt, but that was about it.

As for overnight news, nothing too surprising there either:
As expected and as Draghi has repeated twice, the last time just last week, the ECB will not take losses on their Greek bonds, which means the Private Creditor losses will be even bigger, which has a lot of ramifications for sovereign debt, depending on whether Greece can close the sale without CACs. Draghi seems to be the only EU figure that says what he means and means what he says. There is a sense that the Greek PSI deal will not get done or is not credible.

Schaeuble, repeated again that a Greek default will not be as bad as it would have been a year ago, he's clearly focused on fixing the problem with Greece, just not to Greece's benefit.

On the eco-news, European Industrial output declined 1.1% with Germany being a leading contributor to the decline at a 2.7% decline after November's .3% decline (remember that the EU benefits Germany more then any other country in that they have a free trade zone). EU troubles are having a clear impact on the German Production dynamo. Perhaps Germany should be punished for such a nasty decline, after all, it was WORSE then Greece's at 2.4%!  Also in the data, employers are cutting jobs 3 time faster then in 2011. Recession? I think the question is when if it is not already on now?

Greek Q4 GDP data came in at a disappointing -7% making this a 4th consecutive year of a worsening recession. The unemployment rate is over 20%, it should be noted Spain's UE rate is 23%. In other word, there are a lot of potential rioters available.

After Spain was cut by two notches by Moody's last night, there's news that the EU intends on "Punishing Spain" for its deficits and inaction. Perhaps Germany is looking to reshape the EU?

In the US, Retail Sales Miss, this makes 3 months in a row coming in at .4% on consensus of .8% and that on a downward revision (formerly .1% revised to 0%). Take away the seasonal adjustment and retail sales saw their largest 1 month decline EVER! The last time Retail Sales missed 3 months in a row, was in 2008, not a great vintage for the market. Remember AEO and other retailers I brought up as trade ideas, saying, "There's something wrong in the sector" just last week.

The Euro overnight looked horrible a did ES, but we'll get to updated charts of those in a moment.