Showing posts with label Tom McClellan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom McClellan. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Election Years Are Different | Tom McClellan

I have been writing about the Presidential Cycle Pattern since 1994, using the pattern which is derived from averaging together SP500 price data in 4-year chunks of time. One difference in how I do this versus others is that I start each 4-year period as of November 1 instead of January 1, to better align with election day. This week's chart looks at the differences (and similarities) in the versions of the Presidential Cycle Pattern depending on what type of president is in office. The green line reflects first term presidents from a different party than the last president, and reflects the condition we have now.

  » March is typically a sideways month, part of a larger sideways pattern 
lasting all the way until late May. The market normally rallies from June to election day. «

[...] A lot of the time, the two patterns behave very similarly. But in March of the election year, there is a notable difference. When a first term president is in office and running for reelection, March is typically a sideways month, part of a larger sideways pattern lasting all the way until late May. March is different, though, when a second term president is in office (red line). [...] The stock market normally rallies from June all the way to election day
[November 5] when there is an incumbent running for reelection. And usually an incumbent will win reelection. That is how things normally go.
 
Larry Williams identified June 2024 in the current decennial pattern
 as  » the sweet spot with 90% accuracy « to buy and hold until December 2025

[...] This year we have a challenger who is not an unknown quantity (to Wall Street), who at the moment has a slight lead in the polls. This type of condition is totally backwards from how election years usually go.  Add to that the additional unknowns about how President Trump is facing multiple trials for alleged crimes, and we have an election year completely unlike any previous one.  So trying to run a forecast model based on how things have gone in prior election years may just not work this year.
 

Friday, March 8, 2024

Gold Breakout - Target 2,530 to 2,700 | Peter L. Brandt


This is a FOR REAL breakout in Gold. Goldfinger points to a target range of 2,530 to 2,700.
 
 
June is typically the lowest month for Gold. 
The graph is based on the average prices; there are times when June tops rather than bottoms. 
Buy dips around monthly pivot levels. 

Friday’s Commitment of Traders (COT) Report from the CFTC had an interesting point about gold. The big money "commercial" traders responded to the rally in gold this week by posting the biggest jump in years in their collective net short position. This marks this week’s pop as at least a short term price top.

There has also been a big jump in total open interest lately. Usually such events mark a blowoff top in gold prices, although occasionally they are seen at a breakout point.

 Curiously, though, the small speculators in the "non-reportable" category were not chasing this week’s rally, and instead they reduced their net long position. They have not been net short as a group since 2016, so the analysis task consists in evaluating their relative net long position as a group. Having the small specs feel scared by this rally says it has some enduring legitimacy, once the short term overbought condition can get worked off. 

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

The Heartbeat of the Sun│Valentina V. Zharkova et al.

Valentina V. Zharkova (2016) - We will see it from 2020 to 2053, when the three next cycles will be of a very reduced magnetic field of the sun. Basically, what happens is these two waves, they separate into the opposite hemispheres and they will not be interacting with each other, which means that resulting magnetic field will drop dramatically nearly to zero. And this will be a similar condition like in the Maunder Minimum.
 

What will happen to the Earth remains to be seen and predicted because nobody has developed any program or any models of terrestrial response – they are based on this period when the sun has maximum activity — when the sun has these nice fluctuations, and its magnetic field [is] very strong. But we’re approaching the stage when the magnetic field of the sun is going to be very, very small. 

 
See also:
 

Saturday, March 10, 2018

S&P 500 Index vs Eurodollar COT | Update


While the Nasdaq 100 already surged to a new all-time-high last Friday, the S&P 500 Index is still below the late January 2018 high. However, also the S&P 500 seems to follow the Eurodollar COT's Leading Indication towards a major high in stocks around March 23rd (± 2 weeks). See also HERE

Sunday, January 28, 2018

S&P 500 Index vs Eurodollar COT | Forecast 2018


Here is another Tom McClellan approach to forecast the stock market one year ahead: In the above chart the blue line represents the Commercials' Position Net Long Position in the Eurodollar (COT Report available HERE) as % of Total Open Interest, set forward 54 Weeks. The projection seems to correlate best +/- 2 weeks. About the hows and whys of this indicator, Tom McClellan, the inventor, wrote back in August 2015: "The basic idea is that I take data from the weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report on the commercial traders’ net position in eurodollar futures, and then use that as a leading indication for the SP500.  In this case, the term Eurodollar (ED) refers not to a currency relationship, but rather to dollar-denominated time deposits in European banks. So it is an interest rate futures product [...] I do not know why it works to have the ED COT data shifted forward by a year to see what the SP500 will do. But after seeing that it has worked for several years, at some point we stop wondering about the “why” question, and start to accept that there really is something working here." (HERE) However, he later commented this was one of his "favorite indicators. But favorite does not mean perfect" (HERE).

Saturday, January 27, 2018

DJIA vs Crude Oil Set Forward 10 Years | Major High around June 2018


Tom McClellan's approach projects a major high in US-stocks into around June 2018, and a major low into January 2019 (see also HERE + HERE).

Monday, February 13, 2017

Sunspots - The Real Cause of Higher Grain Prices | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (Jul 27, 2012) - Sunspots are a big driver for wheat prices. Various pundits are putting out stories blaming the drought in the plains states on global warming [...] A better explanation for the drought, and the ensuing spike in grain prices, is that this is all part of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. But to find that relationship in the data is what the story is about. The first point to understand is that sunspot activity has now been scientifically linked to changes in cloud formation. When the sun is more active, the charge particles streaming out from sunspot activity help to sweep away cosmic rays that might otherwise hit earth's atmosphere, where they play a role in cloud formation [... | HERE + HERE] Once you get past that more difficult scientific hurdle of understanding that cosmic rays and clouds are related, it is pretty easy to understand that less cloud formation is related to less precipitation, and thus poorer growing conditions for rain-irrigated crops. That is what we are seeing with this year's drought, and it has been pushing up grain prices accordingly. Looking across the last hundred years of price data on wheat, it can be difficult to see the relationship between the sunspot number and wheat prices. Part of this comes from the fact that there are other factors which sometimes act upon crop yields and thus grain pricing. But a big factor is that the units we use to measure wheat prices, i.e. US dollars, can vary themselves, causing the relationship with sunspots to sometimes be disguised by what the dollar itself is doing. 



If we look at the history of these two sets of data before the modern era of floating currency exchange rates, we can better see how they were correlated. This chart shows raw wheat prices, un-adjusted for the value of the dollar. The sunspot number data is shifted forward by 2 years to reveal that bottoms and tops in the sunspot number tend to be followed a couple of years later by bottoms and tops in wheat prices. This relationship got into some trouble in the middle part of the chart, when President Roosevelt's New Deal price fixing artificially inflated wheat prices. The intention in the 1930s was to benefit farmers by keeping wheat prices up. That effort switched during WWII to the government putting a cap on all prices, including wheat, to support the war effort. Rationing of food, fuel, and other items took over for market forces. Additional trouble came in the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo pushed up oil prices in 1973-74, reducing acreage under cultivation. Then later in that decade, the rising value in the dollar pushed down the dollar price of most commodities compared to prices in other currencies. So using dollars to see the normal cyclical relationship in price data became problematic.


All of this explanation brings us (finally!) back to the lead chart above. In [the above] chart, I have adjusted the dollar price of wheat, multiplying it by the US Dollar Index, which was created back in 1971. This mathematical step produces a unit-less measure of the value of wheat by factoring out the dollar's movements. Doing this allows us to better see how the peaks and troughs in wheat prices have been related to the sunspot cycle. I want to emphasize again that the sunspot number is shifted forward in that chart by 2 years, to reveal its leading indication for how wheat prices will behave. The conclusion from this is that the upward move in the value of wheat right now is just following the swoop upward in the sunspot number that began in 2009. We should expect to see generally rising prices for wheat and other grains until about 2 years after the sunspot cycle has peaked, a peak which has not even happened yet.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Lumber Futures vs Housing Starts and Jobless Claims | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (Nov 19, 2015) - Lumber prices tell us pretty reliably and ahead of time about what is going to happen to real estate prices
and activity, plus interest rates. They can even tell us about what unemployment is going to do.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Bund Spread Gives Permission for Bear Market | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (Sep 24, 2015) - [...] German government bonds are known in the industry as “Bunds”, a contraction of the prefix “bundes” which is German for “federal”.  At the major stock market tops in 2000 and 2007, we saw the peak in the 10-year Bund-Treasury spread appear well in advance of the final price tops for stocks.  So because that spread was still rising in April 2014, my supposition then was that the uptrend had more months to live. Now we see a different condition.

Credits: Tom McClellan HERE + HERE
The Bund-Treasury spread peaked at 1.81 percentage points back in March 2015, and has since been contracting. Meanwhile, the DJIA and SP500 kept on rising to incrementally higher price highs as the summer wore on, eventually breaking down with the August 2015 minicrash. 

[...] With a divergence now in place between the DJIA and the Bund-Treasury spread, we can have a reasonable expectation that a bear market for stock prices should ensue.  If it plays out like the last two, the bear market should last until the Bund-Treasury spread gets back down at least to parity, or preferably even lower. That could take a while; in the 2000 and 2007 examples, it took a couple of years. The eurodollar COT leading indication already tells us to expect a downward trend until April 2016, so that gives us at least several months to see how the Bund-Treasury spread behaves.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Major Market Peak in August - Bear Market into 2016 | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (06/19/2015) - It's a little bit of an exotic indicator but it's probably my favorite because it gives us the answers a year ahead of time. What I'm doing is I'm looking at the commitment of traders report that's published each week by the commodity futures trading commission (CFTC) and they give a report on what all of the futures contracts that they track and who's holding them: either the commercial traders, which is the big money; the non-commercial, which is kind of the hedge funds; and then the non-reportables, which is people with very small positions that are not even worth having reported individually. The commercials are the smart money so when you look at what the commercials are doing as a group in eurodollar futures—that's an interest rate product, not a currency product—that tells you what the stock market is going to do a year later.

The stock market tends to follow those same dance steps almost literally. It got into a little bit of trouble back in 2013 when those traders weren't anticipating the stimulus of QE3 and it didn't work back then but it's generally been working almost perfectly since about 1997 [see chart below]. It correctly forecasted the 2008 decline. It correctly forecasted the bear market in 2002 and 2003. It correctly forecasted most of the big up-move that we've had off the 2009 bottom and now it's telling us we have a top due in early August and a decline into early 2016.

Friday, June 12, 2015

The Magic of 150 Months | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (June 11, 2015): A period of 150 months (12.5 years) shows up in lots of places as the time distance between several important turning points for stock prices. [...] the 150-month period is related to a longer 393-month turning point pattern by virtue of the Fibonacci ratio.  Multiply 150 times 2.618 and you get 393.  Alternatively, if you multiply 393 by 0.382, you get 150. It works backwards and forwards. [...] This is all relevant at the moment because we are arriving at the 150 month anniversary of the 2002-2003 lows [...] Counting forward 150 months from October 2002 gets us to April 2015.  And 150 months from March 2003 gets us to September 2015.  Split the difference, and we have May to July 2015, and that’s right where we sit now. 

Synodic Period of the Jupiter-Pluto Cycle = 12.46 Years = 149.52 Months.
Calculated and charted with
Timing Solution
.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Shifted Eurodollar COT points to SPX Major High in August | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan (May 07, 2015): I do not know why it works to have the EuroDollars COT data shifted forward by a year to see what the SP500 will do.  But after seeing that it has worked for several years, at some point we stop wondering about the “why” question, and start to accept that there really is something working here.

I should emphasize that the relationship broke down during the Fed’s QE3, the $85 billion per month program of expanding the Fed’s balance sheet which started in September 2012 and then tapered down to nothing by October 2014.  During 2013 the once-nice leading indication seemed to be inverted for a while, and then the two plots got back into sync again starting in late 2013.  That was a frustrating time since I had come to trust its message so much when it was working well in 2011 and 2012. That just proves the point that no indicator is infallible, and one must continue to pay close attention to what is going on, just to make sure that everything is working as it is supposed to.

With the relationship back in sync now, it is appropriate to look ahead to a top due this summer, and some ugliness for stock prices this fall.  Ideally the top is due in early August, but there can be slight differences in the texture of the ED COT pattern and the actual behavior of the SP500. More HERE & HERE

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Crude Oil's 10-Year Leading Indication for DJIA | Tom McClellan

Tom McClellan - Chart In Focus (December 11, 2014)

Tom McClellan recently presented a 10-year leading indication relationship between oil prices and the stock market, as shown in the above chart. The current oil price slide says that sometime around 2024 some type of “echo” in stock prices from this year’s oil price drop can be expected. 

Stock prices echoing oil price movements with a 10-year lag has “worked” for over 100 years and there is enough evidence to accept it, even if we cannot explain it. For now, the message of this leading indication is that the oil price rally from 1998 to 2008 has yet to see the full extent of its echo during the 2009-2018 period. While the current dip in oil prices is going to be bad for stock prices about 10 years from now, it is not really a problem for stock prices in real time. 

The following chart zooms into this correlation between the S&P500 and the Crude Oil Price shifted 10 years into the future and suggests the S&P500 would continue moving down next week, then up into end of December before forming a major low around January 6. Another rally into early July - with a correction from around March 20 to April 24 - should follow.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

DJIA 2013-2014 vs 1929

Calculated and charted with Sergey Tarassov's Timing Solution. For the methodology see HERE
Tom DeMark detected this 2013-2014 analog with 1929. It points to a very important market top on January 14, 2014. However, in a recent interview Tom DeMark was expressing his frustration about his signals not working due to constant FED manipulations. Stan Harley has figured on January 10, 2014 as an important top based on Fibonacci cycles. Based on George Lindsay's techniques, Ed Carlson targets the first half of January as the later of two likely ultimate top dates for this uptrend: "The current LLH interval points to a top on 1/2/14."

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Update - S&P 500 vs Commercial's Net Positions in Eurodollars 1 Year Ago

Tom McClellan discovered that commercial traders' net positions in Eurodollar futures shifted one year into the future are very likely to forecast the direction of the US stock markets (HERE).  CITs are (+/- 3 TD * ):

10/18/2012 high
11/08/2012 low
11/29/2012 high
12/13/2012 low
01/03/2013 high
02/14/2013 low


* COT-data  is  taken  from  the  close  of business  on  Tuesday  and  then released on the following Friday at 3:30 PM ET for futures only. It is also released twice a month or every other Monday for futures combined with the figures for options.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

S&P 500 Today = Eurodollar COT 1 Year Ago | Tom McClellan

In May 2011 Tom McClellan unveiled a sensational discovery:
There are some jewels in the CFTC's weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report:  ... Commercial traders' net positions in eurodollar futures shifted forward by one year foretell the the stock market.
... Let's pause a minute to let that deep point sink in. Commercial eurodollar traders seem to "know" a year in advance what the stock market is going to do.  It is not a perfect correlation, but it is a darned good one.  I'm not sure what makes this work, but I have seen that it has worked great since about 1997 ... The term "eurodollars" should not be confused with the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro
(HERE & HERE).
Projected CITs for the S&P 500 are (since COT data is weekly, CITs are +/-):

09/13/2012 high
09/20/2012 low
10/18/2012 high
11/08/2012 low
11/29/2012 HIGH of the Year
12/20/2012 low
01/03/2013 high
etc.
 

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Sunspots predict Unemployment Peak in 2015-16 | Tom McClellan

"... we can expect a bottom of the current decline in unemployment around 2012. Then we should see a rising unemployment rate in 2013 and beyond, reaching a peak about 3 years after whenever the current sunspot cycle sees its peak."

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Eurodollar COT Indications for Stock Market Tops | Tom McClellan

www.mcoscillator.com - February 03, 2012 

... For almost a year, we have known that a top was due to arrive in February 2012.  And sure enough, stock prices have been rising nicely in recent weeks as fulfillment of that expectation.

Now this leading indication says that things are going to get less fun for investors for a while. The next 3 months show a sideways to downward structure in the eurodollar COT data, and the implication is that the steep price advance that we have been seeing should transition to a more sideways market ...

Eurodollar futures COT chart (from last year) sees the S&P 500 correcting until June, but then rallying hard. The next major inflection point is due in early June, when this leading indication says that a big multi-month rally is due to begin

_____________________________________________

www.mcoscillator.com - May 05, 2011 



There are some informational jewels in the CFTC’s weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report, and sometimes in ways that most people would not imagine. This week’s chart looks at data on commercial traders’ net positions in eurodollar futures, but with a twist: that data is shifted forward by one year to reveal that it actually leads the movements of the stock market. 

... The term “eurodollars” should not be confused with the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro.  It refers to dollar denominated time deposits in European banks, and the term predates the creation of the euro currency.  Eurodollar deposits typically follow the LIBOR interest rates.

... I am taking data from the eurodollar market, and applying it to an analysis of the US stock market.  The key discovery that I made a few years ago is that the movements of the SP500 tend to echo what the commercial eurodollar traders were doing previously.  I played around with alignments to get the best fit, and found that a one-year lead time gave the best correlation.


Let’s pause a minute to let that deep point sink in.  Commercial eurodollar traders seem to “know” a year in advance what the stock market is going to do.  It is not a perfect correlation, but it is a darned good one.  I’m not sure what makes this work, but I have seen that it has worked great since about 1997.  It may help to understand that the commercial traders of eurodollar futures are typically the big banks, who are using these futures contracts to manage their assets and fund flows.  So what we are seeing in their futures trading are responses to immediate banking liquidity conditions, and those actions give us a glimpse of future liquidity conditions for the stock market.  These liquidity conditions are revealed first in the banking system, and then the liquidity waves travel through the stock market a year later.  But even if we cannot identify exactly what makes something work, after a few years of seeing that it does work we can learn to accept it.