Stock Market Today: August 14th- 18th, 2023

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Wednesday, August 16th, 2023.

 

Top of the morning StonkForumers! Happy Thursday to all of you and welcome to the new trading day and a frrrrrrrrrrrresh start. Here is a quick check on those futures as we are a little over an hour into the US cash market open.

GLTA on this Thursday, August the 17th, 2023!

 

Morning Lineup - 8/17/23 - Looking Over Their Shoulders
Thu, Aug 17, 2023

Investors are trying to muster an up day as futures trade modestly higher an hour ahead of the opening bell. Jobless claims and the Philly Fed Manufacturing report were just released. The former was basically right in line with expectations while the Philly report unexpectedly increased. One potential negative of the Philly report was the fact that like its Empire counterpart, the Prices Paid component showed a notable increase.

With the flip of the calendar into August, the general tone of the market shifted on a dime. Look no further than the chart of Apple (AAPL). The stock closed at an all-time high on July 31st, but since then it’s been all downhill as the stock has corrected more than 10%, erasing more than $300 billion in market cap in the process. That’s greater than the market cap of all but 20 US publicly traded companies!



At the sector level as well, the tide has gone out. The image below is a snapshot of sector ETFs from our Trend Analyzer as of the end of July. At that point, all but one sector was overbought (1+ standard deviations above its 50-DMA), and two sectors – Communication Services and Energy - were at ‘extreme’ overbought levels.



The sector picture has changed significantly in just over two weeks, though. As of yesterday’s close, only one sector – Energy – remains at overbought levels, and three have moved into oversold territory (Utilities, Technology, and Real Estate). Also notable is the fact that every sector has traded lower over the last week with all but Health Care posting declines of more than 1%.



Just as there’s nothing like a rising market to improve investor sentiment, all it usually takes is a market pullback to get investors nervous. This week’s sentiment survey from the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) looks as though we may be starting to see that play out. Over the last week, bullish sentiment dropped from 44.7% down to 35.9% which is down over 15 percentage points from the recent peak back in late July. Certainly not a panic, but bulls are starting to look over their shoulders.

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Thursday, August 17th, 2023.

 

Top of the morning StonkForumers! Happy Friday to all of you and welcome to the final trading day of the week and a frrrrrrrrrrrresh start. Here is a quick check on those futures as we are over an hour into the US cash market open.

GLTA on this Friday, August the 18th, 2023!

 

Morning Lineup - 8/18/23 - Extremes
Fri, Aug 18, 2023

Futures are down. What else is new? This morning we have China to thank as troubled property developer Evergrande filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy. In spite of the news, the yuan is actually rallying a little bit on reports that the PBoC has instructed banks in the country to support the currency. There's no economic data on the calendar today, so there won't be much to drive markets between now and the opening bell. It's hard to imagine what kind of catalyst could turn things around heading into the weekend, but how we do end up trading between now and the closing bell will give a good read on where sentiment really stands.

If you’re looking for an example of the manic nature of the market, look no further than the last 26 trading days. The chart below shows the net daily breadth readings of the S&P 500 since July 13th. Closing out July, bulls took charge of the market as there were just two days of negative breadth in the last thirteen trading days of the month. After ‘conquering’ the market, bulls quickly found that maintaining control would be a lot harder, and in the first thirteen trading days of August, breadth has been turned completely upside down with just two days of positive breadth.

Besides being an unlucky number, thirteen is a somewhat arbitrary number when analyzing the market, but we did find it interesting that the two days of positive breadth in the market over the last thirteen trading days is the fewest amount of positive days in a thirteen day window since late September 2022, and the 11 positive days in the thirteen day window that preceded it was the strongest since March 2013. In this market, investors are either all in or all out.

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Friday, August 18th, 2023.

 

Here is the quick sneak peek at next week's most anticipated earnings calendar: