Helene Meisler

Let’s compare the market wants of today with those of the late 1980s, and why I’d like to see a break of 3800 on the S&P 500.

Many charts are heading into overhead resistance, so we will get to see if they can eat through it.

Expect several tests this week that include stocks, banks, energy, bonds and the U.S. dollar.

Tech stocks seem to believe there was a ‘Powell Pivot.’ Let’s check the indicators, see what’s ahead from sentiment stats, and check out lots of charts.

When intermediate term indicators are overbought, the best the market can do is chop and more likely correct.

On the fifth day, we rallied. Doesn’t have quite the same ring as on the seventh day, but it’s the same sentiment. Markets rarely go up or down in a straight line. Remember the Dow’s winning streak also finally got stopped. The end result is that we have been chopping about for nearly four weeks now. The S&P hovers around 4,500, while Nasdaq clings to that 14,000 area. Thus far the overbought reading has brought us chop. Monday’s rally didn’t change any of the indicators, though. Heck just look…

I sense a sentiment shift. Not a wholesale one. Not even enough to make me think folks are scared. It’s more like they are no longer bullish. Right now the narrative is that August is a seasonally weak month, so most folks are shrugging. I have even heard the term garden variety correction. I secretly think most are shrugging, because this week the mega-cap tech stocks are hanging in there. Generally speaking, those folks will eventually start chatting with a lot more concern in their voice. Tha…

We are at that point in the decline where there are precious few groups -- or at least no groups that ran up in July -- that haven’t been hit, or at least had a day of some panic selling. We’ve already seen the selling in fan favorite Apple . Oh sure, you might say, Well, Apple’s earnings weren’t great. But what about a stock like Meta that had earnings everyone loved? Let’s set aside for a minute the fact that it broke that long standing uptrend line and look at another pattern on the chart. In…

We finally got a proper oversold rally. And now folks will be all bulled up because of Nvidia’s earnings. I say let’s take a look at bonds instead. They finally rallied (rates backed off) and they find themselves at a critical level. You see this 4.20% area was the breakout last week. A move back under 4.20% would tell us this breakout was more a fake out than anything else. So the next few days focusing on this seems to me key, especially as Chair Powell will chat at Jackson Hole on Friday. I t…

NOTE: My next column will be Sept. 5. Longtime readers will know that I have a tendency to see head-and-shoulders patterns everywhere. If someone asks me about a cup and handle, I never seem to see it. A bull flag? Nope. A bear wedge? Ya got me. For those I need to go to the book and look them up. But somehow my brain sees head-and-shoulders patterns all the time. Tops and bottoms. So, I figure we should discuss the head-and-shoulders tops that have formed in many of the major indexes. Why haven…