On Monday, this blog posted that this stock market at this juncture is —



TRICKY, TRICKY, TRICKY.

No kidding.

At that point, for Monday, the market, according to many technical indicators, was poised to sell off, ending the splendid rally from December. But then it didn’t sell off.

Instead, yesterday, it gave a tentative, but likely, indication it was going to continue to go up into a typical bull-market cycle advance, and today on the opening gap and with its pre-lunch follow-through from the open, it appeared the snorting gods were in their heaven and all was right with bull world.

Then, during the day a quick slide took everything negative. Not by much, hardly enough to notice on daily charts at the end of the day, but it was enough to turn long-term breadth negative again (see the dots on the chart below), which makes being long the market dangerous and while short-term breadth did peek above the zero line for a day a look back looks pretty bearish (the yellow line on the chart below) with highs below highs generally all the way back to the beginning of the rally.

Tricky.

I’ve long said this is the rally to make everyone believe a bear market did not begin in September of last year, that the bull market from as far back as Obama’s first term was resuming and continuing and it may still be (it sure looked like it yesterday), but it will not surprise me if a benign dip like today turns into a raging grizzly while the buy-and-holders sitting at The Palm or at Smith & Wollensky are wondering why the steaks are taking so long.

For today I’m posting my “Black Candle” chart. Black candles shows up when an index or ETF or stock or whatever one’s trading closes higher than the day before (usually on a gap) but lower than its open. There are candlestick names for these kind of chart patterns but just plain “black” is fine with me.

Today, notably, we had black candles on SPY (below) and TQQQ, and remarkably on FNGU (the leveraged ETF for the FANG stocks). They don’t always signal tops of swings, although I can’t think of anything else that comes as close (see examples on SPY below), but they are alerts. They do signal sudden indecision. And they are useful markers, pretty much as simple as it gets — go long above the high of the black candle, go short below the low of the black candle as the indecision gives way to a direction either up or down.

(click on the chart for a larger view)



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