As Bullishness Returns to the Market: Can the Rally Continue? (SPY, QQQ, DIA, GOOG)

The S&P 500 is up about 5% since I changed my stance on the stock market from bullish to bearish back on November 19th and all of the fundamental reasons for the change are still intact (although I’m neutral on a technical basis). Recent news has been mixed or negative and not helping the situation is the announcement over the weekend from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that the yuan is not overvalued and that there is a chance of a double dip recession in China.

Many of China’s trading partners (including the US) have been upset with China’s handling of their currency during one of the most devastating economic period in recent history (China had been gradually appreciating the yuan but stopped in 2008). Adding to protectionist issues, Google said over the weekend that is 99.9% sure it will be closing it’s China.cn web portal and China made a warning to Google’s Chinese partners that they will be responsible for any search related problems on their own website.

Despite all this negative news flow, investors has been hanging on to hope with the tired lines of “things are getting less worse”. Bulls are still reciting facts about recoveries in past recessions as if the more they repeat them, the more they will apply to the current crises. Unfortunately they do not.

It would seem that people are ignoring fundamentals and the more the stock market rises, the more bullish they will become. The downside to this strategy is that most people who are bullish are already invested. It is almost always short sellers covering their positions that launch the market into it’s final peaks before coming down and this is certainly how it feels to me.

The chart above from Bloomberg gives some good color to the situation. There is no “clear” indication that we are topping out right now but there are definitely more (and better) reasons to be cautious than to be optimistic. The rally over the last month has been strongly moved by short sellers having their stops hit (trust me, I’ve been trying), and I fear that a few months from now we will be looking back at this point in the stock market as a double top and possibly the highs for the year. Be careful everybody.

-MJB

Disclosure: Net-long the stock market with over 35% assets in cash

Follow-Up: Technical Trouble on the S&P 500 (SPY, GS, JPM, AAPL, CSCO, GOOG, F, GE, CAT, GLD, UUP)

We have posted discussions about this in the past, most recently on November 25th and also on October 30th, where we looked at the charts and decided that the S&P 500 was possibly in for some trouble.  On November 25 the broad market index closed at 1111.18, and today it closed at 1091.94, for a loss of 1.7%.  Basically, the market has gone nowhere in that time.

What has happened, however, is that the chart has given us some more signs that the market is running into trouble.  Here is a 1 yr daily chart of the SPX, similar to the one we showed in our previous posts, except with some updated lines.

As you can see, we still remain unable to break above that 1120 line (yellow horizontal line), which is the long term 50% Fibonacci retracement line from the 2007 high to this years low.  It is likely that we are seeing heavy resistance at this level as traders anticipate this weakness and front run it to exit positions for the year.

Additionally, this chart shows that we have broken the uptrend that was established since the March lows.  Keen observers will note that this also happened in October, but the break is much more definitive this time especially when combined with that price ceiling. However, we will need to take a look at where we close on the weekly chart because that should be much more indicative of future movements.

For good measure, the same analysis applied to the E-Mini futures (/ES) yields similar results:

The /ES is attempting, and thus far failing to break through its own ceiling which has been established at 1112.  As you can see, the E-Mini futures just broke below the upward trendline that has defined this rally since March.

The root cause of this is, in our opinion, fund managers selling off risky assets to lock in the substantial gains some of them have been able to accumulate during this tumultuous year.  Obviously, this situation is not sustainable, as mutual fund managers often have a mandated maximum cash balance, and hedge fund managers generally do not like to have their end-of-year statements to clients say that they are in cash.  But there is a lot of money available to be taken off to the sidelines, so this situation may continue through the end of the year.  It will be important to watch leadership stocks over the next couple weeks such as Goldman Sachs & Co. (GS), JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Apple (AAPL), Cisco, (CSCO), Google, (GOOG), Ford (F), General Electric (GE), Caterpillar (CAT), etc. and of course gold (GLD) and the US Dollar (UUP). We’ll be making a follow up to this over the weekend.

-Lucid Markets Team

Disclosure: Long GS, CSCO, GOOG, GE, GLD, UUP, JPM and the stock market in general through various other positions.

Changing Intermediate-Term Stance on Market from Bullish to Bearish (SPY, DIA, QQQQ)

I brought up some long term technical issues regarding the market in my post from October 30th and although we broke over the downward trend line, I am now changing my overall intermediate-term stance on the stock market from slightly bullish, to moderately bearish.  I will outline my reasoning below:

Unemployment and continued joblessness
The unemployment number have been slightly improving of late but they cant seem to stay under the 500,000 mark. The number of continuing jobless claims are falling faster but Jon Ogg from 24/7 Wall St. aptly points out that the number needs to fall to 400,000 from the current 5,611,000 for the unemployment to stop growing.

We haven’t even felt the real pain from unemployment yet
Thus far, the majority of the unemployed have been receiving jobless benefits under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which provides extra unemployment assistance  so that they can continue to spend and contribute to the economy. This runs out in January, 2010 (only a bit more than a month from now) and nobody is even talking about it (more on this here).

Holiday retail sales may do well after having consumers save for it all year, but this is almost certainly a case where current demand will be coming from future purchasing power. Retail and discretionary sales are down hugely so far in 2009 and instead of getting better, it’s very likely to get substantially worse in 2010. Are people really going to have the same gusto to spend when they have homeless relatives staying with them at home? This is very troubling to me because of the potential negative feedback loop it could cause with additional layoffs.

Congress hates Americans
Whatever happened to all that infrastructure and education spending that was going to create jobs? Oh that’s right, congress and Nanci Pelosi had to pay off all of their supporters and donors before the real economy got any money. Too bad there isn’t much left that hasn’t been appropriated already…

All I see when I watch hearing is a bunch of stunningly uninformed (or plain stupid) grandstanding by our representatives in Congress and it doesn’t seem like the issues of financial regulation, energy independence or health care overhaul are going anywhere.  The government has succeded in changing the playing field and rules of the game, unfortunately, the new playing field and rules seem to change whimsically on a quarterly basis. I believe that all the the uncertainty created by the Government is a large contributor to the lack of investment in capital and workers because there is no way to effectively forecast and plan.

Reading Obama’s tea leaves
By now I’m sure many of you have noticed that President Obama has been pretty on the money with a lot of his recent ‘hunches’ and ‘expectations’ of the economy and the unemployment situation. He talked about how job losses would likely continue in 2010 and a few days later the unemployment numbers came out with the first reading above 10% since the 1980’s.

President Obama also recently broke with the presidential tradition of being the economies cheerleader by saying “It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a double-dip recession”.

I think that the only reason he mentioned the deficit was to give lip service to the Chinese (who had been pressuring him over the falling Dollar) while he was on tour in Asia, but the fact that he brought the phrase “double-dip recession” into things was a little scary. This is especially eerie because of all the things that could put us into a double-dip recession, our deficit is probably not even in the top three. My interpretation is that President Obama is hinting at a double-dip recession in GDP in 2010 and using the deficit as cover.

I feel that people would need to be very greedy and imprudent for the market to be pushed up much from here. Just some food for thought…

– Michael J. Burns

Disclosure: I am net long the market with slight exposure to gold though GLD

http://247wallst.com/2009/11/19/one-million-american-face-lose-of-jobless-benefits-in-january/#more-53948