1. Moving The Markets
The stock market pulled back today after a solid six consecutive days of gains. The S&P 500 dropped 0.24%, the Dow finished down 0.07% and the Nasdaq led the pack dropping 0.83% on the day.
Apple (AAPL) captured headlines today after reporting that it sold 43.7 million iPhones in Q1, which was much larger than the 38 million predicted by Wall Street analysts. The company also approved a roughly 8% increase in its quarterly dividend to $3.29 per share while it also approved another $30 billion in share buybacks and authorized a 7-for-1 stock split. Shares gained 7% in after hours trading after having lost 6.95% during the regular trading day.
Corporate Q1 earnings announcements remain at the forefront of investor gaze. Today, Delta Air Lines (DAL) reported its first quarter results. The company announced an EPS of $0.33, beating the consensus estimate of $0.29. Manpower (MAN) reported its first quarter results. The company announced an EPS of $0.86, beating the consensus estimate of $0.68. Other notable earnings announcements for Q1 that topped analyst expectations came from Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO), General Dynamics (GD), Procter & Gamble (PG), Boeing (BA), Facebook (FB) and Qualcomm (QCOM)
In commodities, Gold gained 0.30%, trading at $1,285 an ounce and Oil dropped 0.24%, trading at $101.51 a barrel.
Our 10 ETFs in the Spotlight zigzagged with the indexes with 9 of them remaining on the plus side YTD.
2. ETFs in the Spotlight
In case you missed the announcement and description of this section, you can read it here again.
It features 10 broadly diversified ETFs from my HighVolume list as posted every Monday. Furthermore, they are screened for the lowest MaxDD% number meaning they have been showing better resistance to temporary sell offs than all others over the past year.
In other words, none of them ever triggered their 7.5% sell stop level during this time period, which included a variety of severe market pullbacks but no move into outright bear market territory.
Here are the 10 candidates:
All of them are in “buy” mode, meaning their prices are above their respective long term trend lines by the percentage indicated (%M/A).
Year to date, here’s how the above candidates have fared so far:
To be clear, the first table above shows the position of the various ETFs in relation to their respective long term trend lines (%M/A), while the second one tracks their trailing sell stops in the “Off High” column. The “Action” column will signal a “Sell” once the -7.5% point is taken out in the “Off High” column.
3. Domestic Trend Tracking Indexes (TTIs)
Our Trend Tracking Indexes (TTIs) slipped a bit and closed the day as follows:
Domestic TTI: +2.28% (last close +2.45%)
International TTI: +3.45% (last close +3.68%)
Disclosure: I am obliged to inform you that I, as well as advisory clients of mine, own some of these listed ETFs. Furthermore, they do not represent a specific investment recommendation for you, they merely show which ETFs from the universe I track are falling within the guidelines specified.
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