1. Moving The Markets
Up, up and away the markets continued to climb today reaching record higher ground. The S&P 500 gained 0.63% with the Dow not far behind posting 0.59% gains, but, of course, the Nasdaq stole the show gaining 1.04% on the day. The day’s gains were broad, with all ten S&P 500 sectors ending higher, led by the industrials sector.
Over the past three weeks, I have noted off and on that investors are anticipating that the European Central Bank will cut interest rates. Well, today it finally happened. The ECB dropped rates to record lows (-0.10%) in an effort to fight the risk of deflation of the Euro currency. The ECB also launched a series of monetary expansion type measures to pump money into the sluggish euro zone economy. This was not full-fledged quantitative easing, although President Mario Draghi said they will take more action if necessary.
In the tech world, Amazon.com (AMZN) saw a sharp jump in its stock today of 5.5% after it released a mysterious Youtube and website mini teaser about a potential upcoming “launch event” in Seattle that will be hosted by the CEO Jeff Bezos. There have been rumors speculating what the new product will be, most hinting at a smart phone. If that is the case, it will be Amazon’s first endeavor into the smart phone competitive landscape.
Our 10 ETFs in the Spotlight jumped with the indexes; 9 of them made new highs today and remain 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) joined the party and headed deeper into bullish territory:
Domestic TTI: +3.57% (last close +3.09%)
International TTI: +4.91% (last close +4.37%)
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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