May 22, 2013

Looking at Brent Oil

Let's make this short and sweet.  Brent Oil looks very weak.  It hasn't been able to recover the late 2012 lows and is still trapped under it's long term moving averages.  We can see the double top measures to at least 91.  

Relative to West Texas Crude, it has continued to weaken after breaking down out of a ~1.5 year wedge.  


In both relative and absolute terms this looks like a short with plenty of room to the downside.  If you forced me to pick one, I'd pick the outright bearish position because Crude isn't looking so hot either.  BTW, if you aren't involved in futures markets BNO is the go to proxy.


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Is this stock market party out of blow?

All sorts of my sell signals went off last week(as referred to here mid-post).  As the market continued to ignore them, I essentially said the hell with it and decided I would focus posts on riding the white lightning until the blow was gone and we all had coke hangovers.  

Today we may have gotten the signal that the coke is gone.  It's signified by major price reversals in the indices.  



Looking at the S&P 100 and 500 breadth data we can see these are completely pegged to the upside.  Something has to give here, right?


Here are the bull % indices of offensive sectors.  indy = industrials; info = tech ; disc = consumer discretionary; fina = financials; ener = energy.  We can see again these are either pegged to the upside OR are diverging from price (shown in transports and tech) as their groups make new highs.  Neither are bullish signs, but keep in mind people have been making arguments about these bull percent indices since March.


Finally, a contrary point of view shown by the up down volume ratio.  When the ratio was at this level or lower during this rally; a varying bounces have followed.  I don't really know one way or another, but thought it's worth pointing out.  



To summarize, we need to take today's market action seriously as it's the most significant price warning signal thus far in 2013.  I'll be watching our bullish ideas to see if they can hold up, but we just don't know what's coming next.  

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Will Dycom's blow out quarter lead to gains in the heavy construction group?

Dycom Industries reported a blow out quarter.  Maybe this can attract some investors to the heavy construction group.  If it does, one name i'm looking at from a longer term perspective is McDermott (MDR).  Here are some details via finviz.


You can see there was a heavy volume breakdown earlier this month that has somewhat paused this week.  If there are signs of reversal, it will be a great long term entry point, where longs of all time frames can prosper.  That said there are no guarantees this will work and it's currently one of the weakest stocks in the market.  I just thought this is worth pointing out.  

Here is the group chart.  We can see this index is likely to break resistance on this large move by DY today. It will also give a bullish MACD cross which would signal the start of a larger trend higher.  We can't count our chickens before they hatch though, note price and RSI resistance trend-lines just above current levels. 


Better looking names in the group include MTRX (mentioned here a few times this year and technically it's my favorite in the group) and LAYN as it quickly rejected lower prices and has reversed higher this week.  

You can view a few charts from the group here

Disqus for ATMcharts

Reminder:

All ideas shown on this blog represent the authors opinion based on the data available.