Our bullishness last week was clearly not the right call. Volatility has crept into the market and there is a lot of uncertainty around what happens next. Therefore, in order to clear our own minds of bias, we will be looking at markets from purely a technical perspective this week.
are the fund managers. In fact, allocations into equities are the highest they’ve been since the 2009 global financial crisis. This worries us. Which has us asking if it’s time to hedge portfolios?
Sometimes markets can be fairly boring. Well, that very much depends on where you look, but if you are looking at the major indices now, things seem fairly boring to be honest. The market keeps grinding higher on better and better looking market fundamentals. Sure at some point the tapering will start and we’ll all suddenly wake up and realise that inflation was not transitory afterall…
The second half of last week got really wild, really fast. Given the fact that hardly anything has changed – in the sense that there are no interest rate hikes on the table for at least another year and a half, and that the FED will continue to buy $120bn worth of bonds every month – we think that the market might have had a bit of a strong ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to the FOMC minutes. Thus, we say buy the dip. As long as the free money keeps flowing, it will be difficult for the market to sustain downside.
Sometimes we just need to be patient and follow the trend. We often get so caught up in the short-term news flow and happenings of the market that we lose focus of the bigger picture. Right now markets are trending higher, so our job is simply to look for opportunities to get on the bus.
Very often we overcomplicate things for ourselves. The easy truth is that trend following it often the best way to interact with markets. Since the trend is currently very firmly up, we’re happy to toe the trend following line for as long as the trend stays in tact.
Markets bounced hard in the second half of last week. It’s almost hard to believe how fast things are changing in the current landscape. Although there are so very many reasons to be cautious, if not flat out bearish, the market is just pulling its ears back and making its way higher despite the conditions of the world around it. Thus, given the strong footing the market ended on last week, and of course the charts, we think that we’ll likely see new highs in the week ahead.
This week I am keeping things a little less ‘opinion’ and focusing just on technical trade ideas. Well, trying to keep opinion out of it at least and just following what the chart says. So let’s get into it.
The weather in the northern parts of South Africa is likely to be a little wild in the week ahead. We just hope that the hurricane that has made landfall in Mozambique does not cause large scale damage. Spending the week indoors, sadly, is nothing new thanks to lockdown. Now we just have to hope that the coal stays dry so that we don’t have electricity disruptions. These are strange times to be living in to be sure. At least we have markets to look at and keep us busy while a hurricane and a virus rage outside.
Very often it’s better to not listen to the news, or the hype of all the mad things happening in the world around us. Most of the time, it’s better to just sit down and focus on the things that we can measure. So to a large extend we try to do that this week, although we must admit the the blue wave in the U.S. is probably the primary driver behind the strength we saw last week. It’s very likely going to be the source of a whole lot more strength in the week ahead.
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