Major Trend Index

We view market and economic risks as high, but the Momentum picture has been convincing enough to prevent us from adopting a maximally defensive posture.

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We don’t like “news-driven” market moves, and it’s pretty obvious that May’s decline was due in large part to the ramp-up in the trade war. That said, trends in the economy and earnings were already weakening prior to the latest escalation.

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Aside from the decidedly bearish action in the Treasury yield curve, U.S. and global money supply growth rates remain sluggish; both the Fed balance sheet and the Adjusted Monetary Base are still in outright decline.

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Weakness in several coincident economic measures suggest that global-policy tightening over the last 18 months is having an impact. The current Fed policy stance doesn’t lead us to believe much improvement is likely in the near term.

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The Momentum work has been the largest week-to-week MTI swing factor for many months, and that was the case again last week. The Attitudinal category improved, reflecting increasing investor anxiety.

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We are not in the “melt-up” camp but we’re impressed by the close similarities in leadership with the greatest late-cycle melt-up of all time, which took place from late 1998 through March 2000.

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Although we are not in the “melt-up” camp, we’d concede that stock market leadership is exactly what we’d expect if we were in that camp: Domestic over Foreign, Large over Small, and Growth over Value. Price action continues to remind us of the powerful rebound off the fall 1998 lows. Current earnings and liquidity trends, however, are not nearly as supportive as they were during that historic market move.

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The Boom/Bust Indicator, a weekly ratio of industrial-commodity prices to initial unemployment claims, has had a near-vertical rebound to old highs in the last several weeks. This index usually peaks out many months in advance of a business cycle peak (although not in 2007, when it provided no warning of the pain to come).

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If the market’s manic rebound succeeds in assuaging consumers’ recently shaken confidence, we can certainly see a scenario in which the economy and corporate profits firm up after their current slowdown… although that is not our bet.

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The Intrinsic Value category remains a drag on the MTI but is well below cycle extremes seen in January 2018 and again in September. The Momentum category, however, continues to nudge the MTI higher for the third consecutive week.

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One of our long-term momentum models improved last week, while the Dow Bond Oscillator—as good of a mechanical monetary indicator as we’ve encountered—pushed further into positive territory.

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Within the Economic work, the big development was a bullish flip in our Dow Bond Oscillator (DBO), which crossed above the zero threshold by the thinnest of margins. Subjectively, however, we are troubled that government yields across the maturity spectrum have been holding near recent lows in the face of equities’ powerful rally.

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Valuations seem to ignore indications that an earnings recession has begun, let alone the possibility that S&P 500 GAAP Earnings Per Share for 2018 could represent not just a short-term peak, but perhaps a cyclical peak as well.

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Read this week's Major Trend.

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All of the domestic and global quantitative Chart Scores in the Momentum category are now positive and both the Advance/Decline and High/Low figures leave no doubt as to the breadth behind the market’s 10-week rally.

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The MTI’s stubbornness during the current rally confirms our overall sense that cyclical risks facing U.S. equities remain high. That said, we have great respect for the action of the market itself—enough so that we’ve allowed net equity exposure in our tactical funds to drift upward.

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Momentum category gain was driven by strength in breadth measures, selected trend models, and most of the Chart Scores.

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