Momentum is with the Bears

This is from Larry McMillan, the Option Strategist. For background on how the technical indicators work, look at the video on the broad market indicators page.

The bulls had just about everything going their way, but they really didn’t do much with it, and now momentum has swung swiftly and strongly in favor of the bears.

SPX Through 2nd July 2009

At this point in time, the $SPX chart still shows major resistance at 950 and major support at 880. We had said before that we thought the bulls would defend the 880 level and they did so strongly — for a while. They bought early, as we thought they might, when the market bottomed at 888 a week ago Monday. Since then $SPX rallied strongly at first, and then weakly, eventually reaching 930. But in just over one full trading day, $SPX is all the way back down to 896. I think that, this time, a full test of 880 is in order.

Put-Call Ratio 2nd July 2009

Weighted Put-Call Ratio

Equity-only put-call ratios have stayed bearish throughout the recent rally. Since they are our most trusted intermediate-term indicator, this is significant.

Market breadth has been the most volatile indicator. Buy signals were issued over a week ago, followed by sell signals this week. The buy signal was a “true” buy signal in that breadth reached oversold levels before the buy signal was issued. Those have been especially strong buy signals this year. To reach that status again would require declines to dominate advances for at least three days, by which time it might be too late — $SPX 880 might be violated by that time.

VIX with Trend Lines

Volatility indices have continued to decline, and thus remain one of the strongest bullish indicators. Even today, with $SPX down sharply, $VIX didn’t rise very far. $VIX won’t turn negative unless it closes above 30. Even then, it could be a false breakout as the probe above 32 was in mid-June (blue line in Figure 4).

In summary, $SPX is still within its wide trading range of 880 to 950. If breakouts occur beyond those prices, they will likely be tradeable.