Monday, August 17, 2009

Quick Trading Note : New Highs/Lows

A quick look at the excellent Barchart site shows that we've made about 900 new 20-day lows across the NYSE, NASDAQ, and ASE, against only 126 20-day highs. We've also made 128 65-day lows. These are the weakest readings since early July.

If we are to stay in a bull market mode, we should see fewer new lows in the current pullback than we saw in July. At July's low, we saw 441 issues across the three exchanges make fresh 65-day lows. Should we exceed that number in coming trading days, it would be an indication of more significant corrective activity in the broad universe of stocks.

Conversely, a dip with fewer shares registering fresh intermediate-term new lows should set us up for an eventual test of market highs at the very least, as the bull pattern in the indicator would remain intact.
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