Cloudbusting

I’ve dropped out of sight for a while, apart from my usual work at theartofchart.net, and my apologies for that. My divorce has been playing out in the background and I’ve been finding that rather depressing. Hopefully in a few months it will be finished and I will be free to move on to a better future, but in the meantime it is heavy going.

I do love writing these posts though and at the very minimum it is good for me to be writing them, so I am making an effort to restart doing these often, and today is a very good day to restart.

Why is that? Well after this impressive move up over 4000 on SPX, breaking the very nice looking topping setup that had been developing below under that obvious resistance, the market could use a retracement and all the indications are that we are about to see that.

Will that be part of a larger high forming here? Who can say? The Fed isn’t really pumping money in any more, but the federal government has been passing some eye-wateringly huge spending bills with more and larger ones apparently on the way. I’ve always wondered what it might cost if every politician was able to fund every pork project they had ever wanted, and it seems possible that within a year or two we may know the answer to that question. We’ll see. In the meantime the flood of spending may push markets ever higher, and 4000 SPX could now convert into a support level. If so, the likely retracement that looks imminent here may deliver the next decent buying opportunity.

What am I seeing that is suggesting imminent retracement on the SPX chart? Well the first reason is that I drew in the next two obvious resistance trendline candidates on SPX last weekend and SPX broke over the first. The second I have in the 4115 area and I think there is a good chance that it will hold in the short term at least. The second reason is the very high quality negative divergence on the hourly RSI 14 that has formed as we have neared that target. There are a lot of those, over a lot of instruments and indices, and these appearing in significant numbers usually indicates at least a short term high, though the lack of any matching daily negative divergence also suggests strongly that these highs will be at least retested within weeks.

SPX 60min chart:

On the daily chart SPX has essentially spent the entire week about the 2sd upper band. That is very stretched. That doesn’t have to end here, but with the levels and negative divergence there is a pretty decent chance that SPX will retreat back below it shortly.

There is an obvious target for that retracement of course, and that target is at a retest of the daily middle band. At the time of writing the SPX daily middle band is at 3988 and rising, so that retracement would likely be looking for a backtest of broken resistance in the 4000 area, and my lean at this stage would be that support would likely be found there.

SPX daily chart:

On NDX the main target is likely to be the retest of the 2020 high, and that target hasn’t quite been reached, but the hourly negative divergence is strong, and when I was looking this morning at the usual large tech stocks I follow, AAPL, AMZN, FB, GOOG, NFLX & TSLA, the only one that didn’t have a high quality hourly RSI 14 sell signal brewing was TSLA, where it had already fixed. This is something that I don’t see to often, and is a strong indicator of an imminent short term high. 

NDX 60min chart:

On the NDX weekly chart there is an obvious potential topping setup forming here, and a retest of the high may be the second high of a double top. I would note the weekly RSI 14 and RSI 5 sell signals that have fixed, so is that potential here, but we’ll have to see how that develops.

NDX weekly chart:

I’m hoping to manage a couple of posts next week and I’m planning for one of those to look at the long case for precious metals, which is looking compelling here in my view.

Everyone have a great weekend. 🙂

Written by:

Richard Chappell

Jack is a 20 year retail trading veteran and co-founder of The Art Of Chart. He started his blog at channelsandpatterns.net in 2010 and since has published tens of thousands of charts looking at hundreds of trading instruments across most tradeable markets, doing original work mainly in the areas of trendlines, patterns and divergences. At The Art Of Chart Jack has taught trading skills, technical analysis, and the discipline and trader psychology that allow those to be used effectively in trading.

09th Apr 2021

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