Hello, everyone, and welcome to Sunday evening. It’s Stephen Whiteside here from theuptrend.com with this weekend’s edition of Stock Market Timing Television. While stock index futures have opened on Sunday night and they are trading right around fair value. So the market is waiting to hear what’s going to happen with the regional bank, First Republic. That news should come out sometime in the next 24 hours. Now, we always talk about the end of month bias being bullish, and this month it was overly bullish. We saw the market up on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. In fact, we saw the Nasdaq 100 make a new high on Friday. And so we can’t rely on that every single month. But we do acknowledge that there is a bullish bias going into month end, and typically that will stop us from getting sold off aggressively. This month it turned out to be a very bullish time for the market. Big winner on Friday was Charter Communications, gave a buy signal on Thursday. Big fall through to the upside on Friday. And the big loser on Friday was First Republic Bank, and it was down over 43 %, down over 75 % for the week.
And then after the markets closed on Friday, it was down another 33 %. So I think the stocks go into zero, even if the bank actually gets saved at all. I think stock investors are going to get totally wiped out here, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Now, looking at monthly charts for the DOW, we’re up 2.48 % for the month, up over 5% year to date. The DOW is still on a monthly buy signal. Looking at the S&P 500, we’re only up 1.46 %, up 8.59 % on the year so far. So still trying to deal with the upper channel line. Now, the Nasdaq 100 was up just under half a % on the month and up over 21 % year to date. So a big up move in March and very little movement in April. Now, you’ve probably heard me mention before that most of the gains in the US stock market this year can be attributed to a handful of stocks. And we’ve currently got Apple responsible for 25 % of the gains in the S&P 500. And you’ve got similar results for the Nasdaq. Then Microsoft, responsible for a little over 20 %.
Then NVIDIA and Meta, above 10 % each. And similar situation for Amazon. And then Alphabet is just below 10 %. Those are most of the gains in the stock market. It has not been a broad rally in 2023. Now, looking at those stocks, Apple made a new high this week, so that’s good. We’ve got Meta making a new high. Microsoft had a huge up week, making a new high. Then NVIDIA did not make a new high, but it was up 2.32 % on the week. Then Amazon pulled back 1.41 %, still trading above the upper channel line. Then Alphabet was up 1.83 %, did not make a new high for this move, but still trading and closing above the upper channel line. Now, what’s not working? Well, the ARK Innovation ETF was down nearly 11 % on the month. It was actually an inside month for them. So a month of indecision looking for a breakout or breakdown of the previous month’s high or low. Then looking at Berkshire Hathaway up 6.41 % for the month. So just two interesting options to look at. Then we’re looking at the Nasdaq composite, which of course is much broader than the Nasdaq 100, has over 3,000 stocks.
It was up just a couple of ticks over unchanged. Still on a monthly sell signal here, that hasn’t changed, even though we’re up over 16 % for the year so far. Then another broad look at the market, midcap, smallcap stocks down 1.86 % on the month and year to date, we’re up 0.44 %. Then looking at semiconductors, big reversal, we’re down 7.3 % for the month. So a complete reversal of last month’s trading but did not close below the previous month’s low, up over 18 % so far this year. Now looking at the Canadian market, the broad TSX Composite, which has over 200 stocks, closed up 2.67 %, up 6.46 % for the year so far. And then the TSX 60, so a much more focused look at the Canadian stock market with those 60 big cap stocks up a little more on the monthly basis and a little more year to date. Looking at the VIX, the VIX continued to move lower this week. It had a very wide bar. We’re going to remain long term bullish on the market as long as the VIX does not close above $22.84 this coming Friday. Looking at a daily chart, you can see on Tuesday we generated a buy signal, had an inside day on Wednesday, and then Thursday and Friday the VIX came down.
We need to close on Monday above $18.56 to give us a new buy signal for the VIX. And we came down to our next price target, 15.63. We closed at 15.78 on Friday. Let’s finish off with a quick look at commodity, starting with copper. Copper is down on the week, did not close below the previous low from back in March. That’s still acting as support. We are still on a weekly sell signal here, no change there. The price of gold was actually up on the week, $9.60. We do have that early warning signal in there. We have closed below $2,000 for the second week in a row. We are still closing above the upper channel line, so we need to close below 1929.80 this coming Friday to give us a sell signal for gold. Silver, on the other hand, is performing much better. No early warning signal. We’ve closed above $25 for the last four weeks in a row, so that has not changed. We certainly traded below $25 this week. We’ve got some little white space between the upper channel line and the bar. We did not close below the previous week’s low, so things are looking a little stronger for silver.
But if they’re going to go down, they’re both going to go down at the same time. Looking at crude oil, we’re in the channel at the moment, and so we’ve been there for the last couple of weeks. We need to close this coming Friday below $71.73 to give us a new sell signal. Then, of course, we’ll be looking to see if we can hold the lows from back in March. You can see we’re stuck in the Fly Paper channel. We’ve been stuck in or attached to the Fly Paper channel for a few months now. We’ll be looking to see if we can break away or break down below the March lows. Then looking at natural gas, you can see we’ve got a nice area between where we are right now and the Fly Paper channel. That would be a very profitable trade. If it ever got started, it still hasn’t got started. So we’re looking for a close as coming Friday above $3.15 to give us a weekly buy signal for natural gas. Okay, folks, that is all for this weekend’s presentation. Waiting to see what happens to First Republic. That’ll probably be a clue to tell us which way the market wants to go next.
We got some Chinese economic numbers out yesterday which were bearish, but nobody seems to be too concerned about that on Sunday evening. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Next time you’ll hear my voice is on Tuesday morning. you..
Stephen Whiteside
TheUpTrend.com
