By Richard Edwards, Managing Director of HED Capital
There is a large three-day turn cluster in equities that is due to start today the 9th April and which is at its densest on Friday, the 11th April – this is the most likely date in the cluster for a high or low point to be made. There are also fixed income turns due tomorrow and/or Friday the 11th, many commodity turns in the same three-day period and currency turns too on Friday. This is the largest and widest-spread collection of turns for many months and the effects should last for some weeks.
Regular readers of HED’s work will know that turns generally mark important highs and lows in price but that we do not know in advance which they will turn out to be. We must wait until the day arrives and judge then what is happening from the prior trend – uptrends lead to highs, downtrends to lows. Sometimes the prior trend is indeterminate and then we must wait for the ‘outrun’ period to see what has happened. Occasionally the prior trend is ‘flat’ meaning that the turn could result in either a new uptrend or a new downtrend, rather like the outcome of a compression signal. If markets are also compressed at turn time, this has the effect of ’turbo-charging’ the compression.
At the moment, we are in the indeterminate or even ‘flat’ state in most equity markets. The very recent trend (that is, over a few days) has been downward in some indices but the slightly longer-term trend is flat in many too – a few are even compressed, such as Canada, shown here; the Value-line index is too.
This may clarify in the next two days as the turn reaches its crescendo – we will report. The longer-term outlook for most equity markets remains poor but a rally can start at any time so we are neutral for now.
Bonds and notes are also compressed again with the same implications – a break is imminent which will probably be large because of the turn, but we cannot tell which way the price will jump:
One clue may be from the BTP (Italian government bond contract) which recently made a top extension:
This is not usually a good indicator for fixed interest markets in general but may indicate that another wave of Euro-worry about debt is about to begin. Any good crisis needs a trigger and this one has stood the test of time – it will probably be the source of many such scares in the years to come as we have often written in the years past. Sell any high that is close to this ringed peak that is close to this ringed peak on Thursday/Friday.
Footnote: Please be aware that a holding period of 2-3 weeks fits well with the forecasting window of this work