Many are watching the disaster in growth stocks unfold, including us at EarningsBeats.com, but the reality is that many other areas of the stock market represent a silver lining. When growth stocks sell off, essentially two things can happen. One, the rest of the stock market sells off as well, indicative of pure market distribution. These types of selloffs can lead to large corrections or even bear markets. The second type of growth stock selloff can be much more bullish in nature, as money simply rotates from very overbought growth stocks to much more reasonably-priced value stocks for a brief period of time. The former represents a necessary departure from current bullish trading strategies. The latter represents a need for patience. I want you to look at last week's performance by sector and decide if the selling was more like across-the-board distribution or simply bullish rotation like we've seen many times over the past 12 years of this secular bull market advance:
7 sectors rose last week while only 4 declined. It was absolutely NOT a case where everything was selling off. It may morph into that type of market environment, but that's not what we saw last week. Remember, the NASDAQ was down more than 5% last week, before Friday's rally kicked in. That 5% drop was over and above the huge Friday drop just prior to last week. The cumulative drop on the NASDAQ 100 from its all-time high was 8%, not far from correction territory, which is considered a drop of 10% or more, but less than 20%. Options expiration may have triggered the start of this 8% selloff, but it was unlikely the only reason.
A week ago Friday, there was a turning point in the stock market short-term. Money rotated very heavily, on an intraday basis, away from aggressive areas like consumer discretionary (XLY) and into defensive, value-oriented areas like consumer staples (XLP). Part of this shift can be attributed to monthly options expiration in February as there was a TON of net in-the-money call premium on key stocks like NVDA, META, PLTR, etc. Nonetheless, it was the 10th-highest bearish distribution day (between the XLY and XLP) since the financial crisis bottom in 2009. The other 9 all occurred during either cyclical bear markets or during corrections. Will this 10th occurrence be any different than the previous 9? The takeaway here is that those types of massive distribution days are NOT normal and should give us bulls reason to pause. They don't occur very often, thankfully.
But let's get back to that sector rotation last week and take a look at financials (XLF), specifically, which gained 2.82% for the week and closed one penny below its all-time closing high of 52.19. The top-performing industry group within financials was full line insurance ($DJUSIF), which broke out of a lengthy period of consolidation, as you can see below:
Bullish momentum is accelerating, as evidenced by the rising daily PPO. Yes, we're overbought with an RSI at 74, but overbought can remain overbought for a period of time. This is a bullish continuation pattern (uptrend followed by sideways, or rectangular, consolidation) breakout and, outside of a possible brief pullback, I'd look for higher prices down the road, ultimately reaching a measurement target of 88-89. I'll be featuring a full line insurance stock in our Monday morning EBD that is in position to benefit from this industry group breakout. If you're not already a subscriber to our FREE EB Digest newsletter, you can CLICK HERE to subscribe.
Happy trading!
Tom
