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Friday, December 18, 2015

Is the year end rally done already?

I have been expecting a year end rally in the last 2 weeks of the year. Starting from Monday and following the FOMC announcement on Wed for a rate hike as expected with dovish comments from the Fed Chairwoman (Yellen), the market went up crazy and had recouped all the losses occurred last week. S&P jumped 70+ points within days, hitting its 50 day MA. This is an action clearly too fast too soon. Reasonably we cannot expect the market simply going up straight without a pause. A pull back should be within the expectation. But last 2 days heavy selloff has been quite intensive and today, S&P dropped down to 2005, losing all its gain from early this week. What a crazy market!!  The question is if there is still a year end rally? It is anyone's guess but I personally still believe we will continue to see a rally in the last few days of the year due to 4 reasons:
  • We are still in a seasonally bullish time period, which has been consistently so for many years
  • Today's panic selloff has made the market quite oversold, which in almost all the cases will lead to a strong rebound, baring black swans emerging over the weekend or next week.
  • Junk bonds have led the stock market for quite some time. The hard selloff of junk bonds in the past week or so is again preceding the current stock market selloff. But at the moment, junk bonds are quite oversold as well (see the HYG chart below). I will not be surprised to see a rebound for HYG towards its 50 DMA (red line). If so, it will again support the idea for a stock market rebound leading to a year end rally.
  • Finally, we did not see a runaway of the volatility as VIX was much contained and did not shoot up to the moon during the rather intensive market selloff. And the call/put options for VIX in the next 2 weeks are relatively even. This suggests traders are not expecting a much higher VIX (which is often associated with lower stock prices) in the near future.
So if anyone who dares to buy today during the panic selling, they may likely be rewarded handsomely next week, unless something devastating occur unexpectedly.



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