Transcript
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. Today, the S&P 500 was down about .2% seem to respond negatively to the stimulus not being passed through the Senate yet the new $2,000 stimulus might not make it. Market’s, you know, waiting to see what’s going to happen. I would caution you about drawing any conclusions from a week like this volume was, again, very low, all kinds of different weird leadership, I don’t think we’re going to see you know, what we really want to see until a little bit later, I would like to take this chance to talk about some different things, specifically to answer some questions.
So one of the questions that comes up all the time, is, you know, what do I watch to make my decisions? Or what do I think about this particular event or that particular event? So let me tell you, you know, kind of what I do watch, really after, you know, 34 years of doing this. Okay, so for starters, I’ll just give you a little bit of a rundown here, let me share my screen. Go. As I mentioned, yesterday, I watch interest rates, I think this is one of the key issues, I bring this up first for a reason, when they’re high on raising, often times the market can struggle, and when they’re low or falling, often times the market does quite well. And you can see it had come up before the last three downturns like we talked about yesterday.
The next thing I look at is the Federal Reserve itself. This is a pretty amazing organization, I like to know what direction they’re going. And I try not to go in the opposite direction. When the Federal Reserve, you know, they’re conducting the monetary policy and maintaining stability, the financial system, when the Federal Reserve is purchasing assets and pushing money out the door, you know, you want to make sure that you’re not going the opposite direction of that. So huge issues to watch what the Federal Reserve is doing and pay attention there. And it kind of goes hand in hand, really, with Congress, you know, it’s three branches.
I’m mostly interested in Senate, House, and the White House. And I’m mostly interested in when all three of those are in the same party, because that’s when a lot gets done. And the key issues that we watch, as far as the stock market goes, are corporate taxes, and government spending. And right now, government spending has a lot to do with these stimulus bills. So those are the key areas that we watch coming out of there. So at the bottom of the market, in March, you had this huge amount of money coming out of Congress, and big money coming from the Fed. And that really, you know, supported the market and made it come back up as far as that goes.
The next thing to watch is really kind of stimulus, sorry, is sentiment. So in, in this particular arena, this is a put-call ratio. And so when that gets really high, that means people are very, very nervous, and might be a time to buy. And that’s what happened here. That was the bottom. When it gets really, really low. That means people are overconfident, quite possibly might be a point to sell. You can see actually just recently here, this has moved up where people are becoming more nervous, which is a good thing gives us some room to run as far as that goes. The other thing I look at is moving averages. And I’ve talked about this several times in the past, but we follow the 20, the 50 to 100 and the 200-day moving average, I want to see what direction they’re going, I want to see how they’re crossing over, and how that relates to the price and et cetera. So that that’s a huge issue as far as that goes.
And then of course, we have our support and resistance, which this is our volume profile that shows how many shares are trading, this is incredibly important really does help quite a bit to understand, you know, where the market might end up, and and how that works. And then, the last technical indicator I watch is called this Elliot Oscillator. This is a 25 year chart by the month, of the S&P 500. And this is the Elliot Oscillator. It’s only crossed over twice, in that 25 year period. But again, it did not cross over here, which was part of the reason why we kind of hung in there also.
So the last thing I do is really, I think kind of interesting, and that has to do with I have a spreadsheet here I pull from Morningstar, all 2300 ETFs that I’m interested in, and I have them all in here for rates of return 12, 9, 6, 3 months, one month and one week. And then I have all of the little downturns that have happened so far this year. I color code everything, and then I sort by different time periods. So for example, the last one week, you can see you know, Cybersecurity did well, Clean Energy, Clean Energy Genomics, Clean Energy, Clean Energy, Clean Energy, Cybersecurity. So, there’s a trend that’s happening. I got to watch for that and make sure we have you know, potential, you know, coverage there. How does that translate to the three or the six month if you go through, and you know, spend some time looking at, you know what’s happening inside of these 2300 ETFs.
If you look at that every week, and you look at how they’re moving, and what’s moving and coming at us, that’s how you find the trends. That’s how you find Clean Energy before everybody else does. That’s how you find these different pieces. Take a look at the one week, you know, the one month, three months, nine months and 12 months, returns across all ETFs and look at see what’s moving, see what’s happening as far as that goes. So, to me, that’s one of the that’s where the rubber really hits the road, kind of shows me what’s happening as far as that goes.
So anyway, I hope that helps answer that question. You know, there are a lot of things to watch, narrowing them down into something more reasonable, I think is the way to go. And then of course, being able to interpret those on an on-going basis. But those are the inputs that I spend the most time with, you know, lots of things that I discarded over the years. People are constantly asking me about unemployment, for example, I haven’t found any great correlation with unemployment in the stock market. So, you know, there are lots of pieces that I don’t follow as much as I used to, and these are the ones that I do. So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you very much.