We all have stories now. I hear them daily. Like the relative who called and wants to buy GameStop (GME) . Or a new Chamath special purpose acquisition company. But I am here to report so far the one relative who matters -- my mother -- has not yet inquired.
I will grant you that she's not got a great track record for calling at tops. It's really at market lows that she excels, at almost bottom-ticking, with the concerned, "should I sell?" phone call. But as I noted yesterday, speculation is alive and well. And obviously rampant.
The wild ride during Monday's market shows you that. When asked by someone who had stepped off the desk for a few hours midday, "What took the market down?" I was stumped. The only thing that I could come up with was the reversal in GME. And if that's what it was, and we will never really "know," then that tells you how tied to speculation the market really is.
Yet as soon as the market came down, the selling dried right up. In the blink of an eye. At some point the selling will not dry up, but rather it will accelerate. We should see an increase in stocks making new lows, before that happens, but it's possible we won't.
In the meantime, breadth was awful for a day that the S&P 500 tacked on 14 points. Upside volume was better than downside volume, so, once again, we see all that speculation showing up as the most active stocks are the speculative ones. There was a time when the most active stocks were dull names like Apple (AAPL) , but now three of the Top five most active names on the New York Stock Exchange were Blackberry (BB) , Nokia (NOK) and GameStop (GME) . I have joked several times that I am waiting for Vonage (VG) to make an appearance, since then we'll know that every stock can come back from the dead.
In the meantime, despite the poor breadth and the higher indexes, none of the indicators have changed. The McClellan Summation Index has ticked down just a bit more. The reality is it now needs a net differential of positive 1,400 advancers minus decliners to stop the downward path, which is quite a lot.
One other indicator to keep your eyes on is the actual breadth. The Cumulative advance/decline line has kept pace with the S&P 500 for the most part, but in the last week or so the S&P has given up no ground (brown line) and the S&P is more choppy to down (blue line). It is very minor at this point. Perhaps it will change, now that the Banks and Energy are down so much and heading toward getting oversold.
In the meantime, the Daily Sentiment Index (DSI) for Nasdaq finds itself back at 88. That typically means one more up day and it should scoot over 90 and once over 90, Nasdaq is short-term vulnerable, which is interesting timing-wise, since we're due to get some big technology stock earnings later this week.
