MARKET COMMENT
Dave Fry’s ETF Digest, August 31, 2009
Even bears need a stimulant to get in their act going. It wasn’t a disastrous day but it wasn’t a good way to end the month given the sour China note. The new maxim may be: “when China catches a cold the rest of the world gets the flu”. Of course this would be a substitution for what used to begin “the US”. It may also be true to say, we just all have the flu, H1N1 or whatever.
My first business trip to China in the mid-1980s allowed me to witness ordinary citizens trading stocks on the street corner in front of the recently opened stock exchange. It was fun to watch and, if you’re a student of history, you’ll realize that’s the way things were done in London and the US more than a century ago.
More profound is the worries what a new bear market in Shanghai portends for markets where shockwaves are felt hardest—commodity, currency and emerging markets —all hit hard today.
Without posting it until the end of the commentary as usual, let’s look at the Shanghai CSI 300 Index right away. It’s the most popular of all the Chinese indexes. It’s important to remember that the constituents may have little to do with popular FXI (FSTSE Xinhua 25 Index ETF) but certainly the index has a psychological impact.
First the daily view with my annotations that include an RSI (Relative Strength Index), two moving averages, candlesticks (for visual effect) and DeMark Indicators. In the blue circles you’ll two occasions where the RSI recently has slipped below 30 indicating severely oversold conditions. Also, note DeMark counts reaching 9 sequential readings heralding some trend exhaustion both on the upside and downside. I’ve also drawn two orange support lines where I think we could find support to work off the oversold RSI but it won’t take much in that regard.
Read Dave’s full market comment here; below are a couple SPY charts.
I promised we’d look at monthly charts today and that’s what we’ll do. That will give us some perspective.
