Trader’s Narrative

Here are some thoughts with my own conclusions at the end:

Ned Davis Research
A very respected institutional research house, Ned Davis’ company relies on 12 indicators covering sentiment, volume, volatility, and breadth. Right now ten are flashing a cyclical buy signal. But a unanimous result isn’t needed for it to be valid. For example, in the bear market bottom of 2002, only nine of Ned Davis Research’s indicators was indicating a buy. But they are not recommending to their institutional clients to start buying. They want to be patient and wait for a retest of the lows. If market internals are healthy on such a retest, then they would suggest going long.

Stock Market Cycle
There are patterns in the market’s history. But so far this year, the market has forged its own path. An election year should be a positive for market returns, especially in the later months of the year. But not this year.

The four year stock market cycle means that 2010 is the year to watch. But according to the decennial cycle, the 8th year in a decade has been good historically. Unless we have a miracle, this year will also be an exception. Here is the master of market cycles, Peter Eliades offering his views:

Credit Squeeze Relaxing
Both the TED spread and the LIBOR rate have receded. As well the price of “insurance” on default for banks has also dropped. There are mounting signs that we are seeing a thaw in the credit freeze that paralyzed the market. My only quibble is the short term rate (90 T-Bill rate) which continues to be pushed down. The bond market is telling the Fed to lower rates. Hopefully they will listen (unlike all the previous times) and get ahead of the situation rather than playing catch up.

Volatilitius Maximus
Volatility has been absolutely insane. There is no gentler way to put it. We’re seeing double digit (or close) moves in the market daily. It is both unnerving and exciting. And here I’m not just referring to the sky high VIX index but also to the breadth numbers which show extremes. The good news may be that such volatility has been historically associated with market bottoms. As I wrote two years ago, extremes in market breadth with the advance decline numbers swinging from one extreme to the other to gather “fuel” for a sustainable trend to be established:

Smart Money vs. Dumb Money
At every inflection point in the market, we witness the smart money and the dumb money do different things. This is how wealth is transferred from one group to the other after all. So far we’ve seen Warren Buffett extract very favorable terms with General Electric (GE) and Goldman Sachs (GS). Terms that the US government hasn’t gotten. That’s another issue though. Although you or I may not be able to negotiate the same terms, it is still valuable to watch what the smart money is doing.

Which reminds me of Tony Oz’s video where he called a bottom. Faced with a melt-up, he did what any smart trader would do, sell into the wave of buying.

Corporate insiders are also considered “smart money” and they have accelerated the rate of their purchases, pushing the buy-sell ratio to 2:1. This is very unusual because usually it is the other way around as insiders sell shares which are given to them as part of their compensation package. But caution is warranted because insiders are notorious for being early to the party - as much as one whole year.

The other end of this see saw is to watch the “dumb money”. I’ve gone into detail over the past sentiment overview regarding the public’s and retail investor’s pessimism during this crisis so I won’t rehash it here. Now that we are getting the first glimpses of the bulls returning, the most important aspect of contrarian sentiment comes into play; watching how the “dumb money” reacts to a recovery in the markets. If they continue to be fearful and pessimistic, even when the market recovers, then the chance that it is a real floor is much higher. But if they quickly switch sides, then we will see more downside.

Conclusion
My own hunch based on all of the above and more, is that this is a cyclical bottom. It is tradeable, and the volatility provides amazing short term opportunities for trigger happy traders but we are far from a secular bottom. You’ll know we’ve hit that when stocks and the whole equity culture of the US and the world changes. When people start outright hating stocks or even the thought of investing.

When everyone laughs at you or feels sorry for you for even hinting that it may be time get back in the stock market. When the valuation pendulum swings way to the other side and measures, whether based on price earnings or price dividend are so outlandishly extreme that you do a double take. That’s when you’ll know we’ve hit a secular bottom. One for generations.

Not a moment too soon, the financial markets reacted to leadership from European governments and central banks over the weekend. Sadly, the US team of Bush (excuse me while I roll on the floor convulsing with laughter) Paulson and Bernanke didn’t exhibit one iota of leadership or common sense. Did anyone expect the same team that continuously reassured the world that everything was fine over the past 2 years to be the ones to actually solve this?

The consensus among smart economists (Roubini), investors and traders (Soros) has been the need for “capital injection” - a euphemism for “buy a truckload of financial common stocks”.

The Old World Shows The Way
The US’s muddled TARP proposal instead was aimed at buying into the nebulous and toxic derivatives at the heart of this crisis. Shares are easily priced each second on the open market so it can’t be easier to value a bank’s “worth”. Whereas the derivatives are next to impossible to untangle and value. Also, a share, because of its perpetual existence, has a multiplier effect. So by injecting $100 billion of capital, you in turn leverage the effect by the P/E ratio which even now is around 10 for the average financial institution.

Of course, by now TARP has morphed into the European model. Which can arguably be also called the Swedish model, since this very solution was used by them in the early 1990’s to get a banking crisis under control. And unless I’m mistaken, the Swedish taxpayer actually got significant capital gains out of the whole thing. Seriously, how ridiculous does Paulson sound when he proposes with a straight face to simply use government money to buy assets of dubious quality and worth… without receiving absolutely anything in return?

You don’t need a PhD in finance to know that way lies madness.

Then again, the news of a concerted European effort may simply have coincided with a snap back rally. If you recall, many had high hopes for the TARP announcement to reverse the market’s decline. It did no such thing. So in effect, while the news seems to have caused the market to rally, we can’t truly prove that it was the force behind it. There are strong reasons to believe that the market was simply exhausted from relentless forced liquidation and just hit the wall.

Timing
Last week I facetiously suggested that if this wasn’t the stock market bottom, we should flee to the hills and buy guns. The future was starting to look like some kind of Mad Max distopia, at least if you believed the breathless analysts on TV and the headlines across newspapers. Then just hours later I learned that Tony Oz had taken a large long position, based on similar conclusions.

Of course, no one knows what will happen in the market. The best one can do is to put aside emotion and to look at the facts. Or one better, and use emotion to your advantage by looking at sentiment, rather than having it control you. Last week’s sentiment overview was clearly the most pessimistic in a very very long time.

90-90 Day? - You Betcha! (wink)
As much as last week’s market’s were smashing all records on the way down, Monday’s rally smashed them on the way up. This was as broad based and furious a come back as the bulls could have mounted.

In terms of volume, 95% was accounted by advancing stocks on the NYSE. We went from seeing more than 2,500 stocks on the Big Board hitting new 52 week lows on Friday… to seeing less than 60 today doing the same today. So yes, today definitely met the requirements for a Lowry’s 90-90 up day - and more!. This is something that we had been waiting for because according to the research, a significant floor is created when the market has fallen significantly (90-90 down days) and then reverses with the same ferocity.

Here is a short excerpt from the research done by Paul Desmond of Lowry’s Research:

The historical record shows that 90% Downside Days do not usually occur as a single incident on the bottom day of an important market decline, but typically occur on a number of occasions throughout a major decline, often spread apart by as much as thirty trading days. For example, there were seven such days during the 1962 decline, six during 1970, fourteen during the 1973-74 bear market, two before the bottom in 1987, seven throughout the 1990 decline, and three before the lows of 1998. These 90% Downside Days are a key part of an eventual market bottom, since they show that prices are being deeply discounted, perhaps far beyond rational valuations, and that the desire to sell is being exhausted.

But, there is a second key ingredient to every major market bottom. It is essential to recognize that days of panic selling cannot, by themselves, produce a market reversal, any more than simply lowering the sale price on a house will suddenly produce an enthusiastic buyer. As the Law of Supply and Demand would emphasize, it takes strong Demand, not just a reduction in Supply, to cause prices to rise substantially. It does not matter how much prices are discounted; if investors are not attracted to buy, even at deeply depressed levels, sellers will eventually be forced to discount prices further still, until Demand is eventually rejuvenated. Thus, our 69-year record shows that declines containing two or more 90% Downside Days usually persist, on a trend basis, until investors eventually come rushing back in to snap up what they perceive to be the bargains of the decade and, in the process, produce a 90% Upside Day (in which Points Gained equal 90.0% or more of the sum of Points Gained plus Points Lost, and on which Upside Volume equals 90.0% or more of the sum of Upside plus Downside Volume). These two events – panic selling (one or more 90% Downside Days) and panic buying (a 90% Upside Day, or on rare occasions, two back-to-back 80% Upside Days) – produce very powerful probabilities that a major trend reversal has begun, and that the market’s Sweet Spot is ready to be savored.

Source: Identifying Bear Market Bottoms and New Bull Markets (Dow Awards folder)

Believe it or not, this is the second Lowry’s 90-90 up day we’ve had within 9 trading days. According to Lowry’s 90-90 up days can be spaced out as far as 30 days from each other and still be effective. And although most people keep strictly to the 90-90 definition, Lowry’s actually mentions above that 80-80 up days also qualify. So if you want to be more flexible like them, on September 18th 2008 we had a 89.5% up day which would make it three strong up days.

LIBOR & TED Spread
As I mentioned a few days back, LIBOR and the TED spread stopped going up and today they actually fell hinting that we may have seen the worst of the credit crisis. As banks start to trust one another and lend again, liquidity will flow back into the financial markets and the forced liquidation will cease. It is still too early to be complacent about this but the first signs of a return to normalcy are there.

Let’s take a look back at my previous commentary on Canadian REITs’ oversold condition on June 27th, 2007. Yup, it is report card time!

Unlike many other trading bloggers who let previous calls drift into the ether I like to keep myself honest by reviewing past calls and analysis. Both to be transparent and to give myself and others another chance to learn (from my mistakes).

…we could be seeing a major trend change with REITs. But even so, they aren’t going to go straight down. I think this technical oversold picture in the short term is still actionable.

So how did I do?
My thesis was that it was yet another correction within a long term uptrend. I was right about an “actionable” short term oversold condition because we did see REITs bounce into July. However, the index failed to ricochet off its 200 day moving average as it had so many times before. So I was wrong in the sense of not seeing a trend shift taking place right under my nose.

Thinking back, I don’t think I did anything necessarily wrong. I prefer to be proven wrong by price action than trying to simply ‘guess’. I think it is always wiser to continue to do what has worked, until it proves you wrong. As long as you are practicing smart money management you’ll be ahead.

Weinstein’s Stage Analysis
If you’re not familiar with Stan Weinstein, what are you doing still reading this? Go and buy his classic book on technical analysis (on your left). Then you’ll have a great grasp of basic TA and understand what follows.

According to Weinstein, stocks follow 4 stages. From his definition, last summer the Canadian REIT sector had all the indications of Stage 3 - topping. It is now in Stage 4 - decline. Simple to see that in the chart: lower highs and lower lows.

As well, in mid-July 2007, the Canadian REIT index’s 200 day moving average plateaued. No surprise really since the index had been going downhill since late February 2007 (red arrow).

It isn’t just coincidence that since that same point in time, the Canadian REIT index has been trading consistently below its long term moving average. Something that it hasn’t done in years. This definitely denotes a major shift in REITs.

Way before they actually did, I correctly surmised that the Fed was going to have to start cutting rates. But my misstep was in not realizing that there were greater forces at play. So much so that a major campaign of tax cuts has not been able to withstand the tsunami of the credit crisis.

On a positive note, the index seems to have found footing recently along with the rest of the market, lifting off from a double bottom formation. If it continues to rise, its next challenge will be meeting the long term moving average from below as it is hurtling down towards it.

I find myself unable to resist the temptation of picking up some Charter REIT (CRH.un); a tiny real estate investment trust that has a 15% yield. Other than that I’m just going to hang on to my long term holdings.

Lesson learned:
When Sam Zell sells, real estate has peaked.

After three consecutive up days - initiated from an extreme oversold condition - the stock market is now pausing to catch its breath.

Although we saw positive breadth today with advancing volume easily trouncing declining volume on the Nasdaq, the market indices didn’t make much headway. The extreme condition I outlined in the Dow Jones Index has now ameliorated with higher prices. In a very short time we’ve gone from only 13% of Dow stocks above their 200 moving average to 37% above their long term moving average.

Cautionary Breadth
As of today’s close, 80% of Dow stocks are above their 10 day moving average! No wonder we’re pausing here. The last time I mentioned this little breadth indicator, was at the beginning of the month when the Dow Jones had 90% of its constituents trading above their 10 day moving average.

When it comes to the S&P 500 index components, more than 80% of them were above their short term moving average yesterday and a slightly less percent today.

So while this presents us with an overbought picture, it is short term in nature. And if we have truly put in a bottom as I believe we have, then instead of losing ground (again), the market will consolidate by chopping sideways before continuing higher. If we do go lower in a cascade fashion, then I’ll know I was wrong (again!).

What, Me Worry?
I prefer to let others worry for me. When or if, I notice that no one is worrying, say like in 1999, then I pick up the slack. Right now I’m kicking back and delegating the hard work of wallowing in gloom to others.

There are so many things to worry about: gold approaching $1000, crude oil at $100, the global credit crisis, the dollar collapse, runaway inflation caused by spikes in staple commodities, a never ending war which is bleeding the US treasury, etc.

Building a case for the bear side is far too easy. Which is why I’m wary of falling for its seductive graces.

A bull market climbs a wall of worry and right now there are ample bricks around.