Let’s jump outside the U.S. and look at some major markets. We begin with China, by way of the FXI, which actually had its peak a full sixteen years ago (!!!!!!!!!) and has been trying to recapture its former glory ever since. Let’s face it, they are a communist dictatorship, and that simply doesn’t lend itself to creativity, innovation, and true prosperity. They have terrorized their billion inhabitants into compliance, on pain of death, but that is not a sustainable business model.
Here we see the international markets have continued to respect their broken long-term trendline for its new role: resistance. Recently, prices have meandered within small consolidation zones, but the overall failure of steady price ascendency is over.
The somewhat broader fund, IEFA, speaks of the same tale. It is completely plausible that the face-off of this pattern has already resolved to the downside, since we are well within the confines of the green tinted area (AKA, we have a failed bullish breakout), and the past several weeks have had price bars cleanly below failed intermediate-term support.