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To listen to the HODLer crowd back on January 26th, you would figure their elementary school flag football team had just won the SuperBowl. Arrogance, certitude, and Homer Simpson “in your face!” declarations ran amok. The surging public interest in bitcoin had renewed as well, illustrated by Google Trends:
There’s pretty much only one chart which has had the stuffing knocked out of it over the past six weeks: volatility. We are back down into the “nothing bad will ever happen again” pre-teens zone.
Since I’ve been understandably distracted the past week, I didn’t really get a chance to take a hard look at charts until well after Friday’s close. To some degree, I was shocked at just how persistently strong things remain. This is not across the board, however, so I wanted to break some representative ETFs up into some appropriate groups, going from strength to weakness.
The most “bears might as well give up forever” chart I see is the Industrials, that is the DIA “diamonds”. This is a breakout, no two ways about it. Not only is it a breakout, but it is one from a formidable base. Scary.
Isn’t it amazing what Central Bankers can do for markets. Case in point is this compressed view of the S&P 500 Index (SPX) in “area” format (monthly chart below). It’s virtually been on a tear since the bleeding from the financial crisis of 2008/09 was abruptly halted with their intervention and injection of monetary support, and it hasn’t had much of a correction since then, relatively speaking.
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