Included with each day’s Morning Lineup and Closer is our Daily Sector Snapshot which offers a look across the internals of the S&P 500 and its eleven individual sectors. One such indicator covered is the net percentage of stocks reaching new 52-week highs. This is essentially the difference between the number of stocks that closed at a 52-week high and 52-week low for a given day.

Typically you would want to see positive readings as it would indicate more positive momentum. For multiple sectors, this reading has begun to spike up recently.  Perhaps the most obvious of these is for the Communication Services sector which topped out at 30% about one week ago as many of its stocks have recently outperformed including some of the largest like Facebook (FB) and Google’s parent company Alphabet (GOOGL).  For this sector, these were by far the highest new-high readings of the past year.  The Technology sector likewise peaked at over 30% last week although for this sector such readings have more precedence in the past year. Similarly, Consumer Staples, HealthCare, and Financials have also begun to pick up over the past several days. While these are working their way back up to similar readings to a few weeks ago, the Utilities sector has begun to see some of the highest number of net new highs since the fall. At the current moment, the Materials sector is the only one with more 52-week lows being made than 52-week highs.  Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to get our Closer, Morning Lineup, and Daily Sector Snapshot.

It has now been over three months since the S&P 500’s last decline of 1% or more back on 10/9.  While it seems like an eternity, the current streak of 67 trading days is nowhere near any sort of record on either a long or short-term basis.  The chart below shows historical streaks without a decline of 1%+ for the S&P 500 dating back to 1928.  The record for the longest streak was back in 1963 when the S&P 500 went 174 trading days – a full eight months – without a 1% drop.  Even more impressive is the fact that in both the 1950s and 1960s there were numerous streaks of 100 or more days. For a decade that is looked back on as one with a lot of upheaval in the US, the 1960s was a period of relative calm for the equity market.

More recently, the current streak of 67 trading days doesn’t look all that impressive relative to streaks we saw back in 2017 and 2018.  Right after the election in 2016 and into March of 2017, the S&P 500 had a 109-day streak without a 1% decline, and then from late 2017 through January 2018, there was another streak of 112 trading days without a 1% drop.  Even in October 2018, there was another streak of 74 trading days.  In other words, in just the last three years there have been three longer streaks without a 1% decline than the current one.  In the S&P 500’s history, there have been 26 other streaks that have been as long or longer than the current one, and half of those went on to last at least 100 trading days.  Get access to all of Bespoke’s research with a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional.  You won’t be disappointed!

The Q4 2019 earnings reporting period starts up Tuesday with a number of key financials firms set to report, including Citigroup (C), JP Morgan (JPM), and Wells Fargo (WFC).  Below is a snapshot of the number of earnings reports expected by day over the next month from our Earnings Explorer tool that’s available to Bespoke members.  As shown, even though earnings season starts up this week, things don’t really pick up until the end of January.

As we do at the start of each quarterly earnings season, below is a list of the individual stocks that have historically been the most volatile on their earnings reaction days.  These are stocks that experience the biggest average absolute one-day percentage change on the first trading day following the release of their quarterly earnings reports.  To make the list, a stock has to have at least 10 years (40 quarters) worth of earnings reports in our Earnings Explorer database.

Infinera (INFN) is the most volatile stock on earnings with an average absolute one-day change of 14.90% on its 49 quarterly reports.  YRC Worldwide (YRCW) ranks as the second-most volatile with an average one-day change of +/-13.00%, followed by Travelzoo (TZOO) at +/-12.79%.

The most notable stocks on the list are Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN).  Netflix (NFLX) ranks as the 4th most volatile earnings stock on the list of companies with at least 10 years of reports.  NFLX has averaged a one-day move of +/-12.63% on the 70 quarterly earnings reports it has had in its history as a public company.  While not as volatile on earnings as NFLX, Amazon (AMZN) has historically averaged an absolute change of 8.74% on its 73 earnings reaction days in our database.  That ranks AMZN as the 35th most volatile stock on earnings with at least 10 years worth of data.

Below is a list of the most volatile stocks on earnings with less than 10 years of quarterly earnings data.  Arlo Technologies (ARLO) ranks at the top with an average one-day change of +/-18.50% on its six prior earnings reaction days.  Container Store (TCS) ranks second at +/-17.33%, followed by Snap (SNAP) at +/-17.21%.  Other notables on the list include Yelp (YELP), Canada Goose (GOOS), Groupon (GRPN), Under Armour (UAA), Twitter (TWTR), GrubHub (GRUB), Twilio (TWLO), Yeti (YETI), and TripAdvisor (TRIP).  Get access to all of Bespoke’s earnings tools with a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional.  You won’t be disappointed!

Last Thursday, we posted the following ‘mystery chart’ on Twitter, and asked whether it was a “buy” or a “sell.”  Judging simply by the looks of it, the chart looks pretty attractive.  It’s clearly trending higher, and after a brief pullback in the second half of 2019, it has seen a sharp rebound putting last year’s highs back into play.

While it was only last week that we originally tweeted the chart, since then there has been a clear breakout above the summer high (~50).  From a technical perspective at least, it looks like our ‘mystery chart’ has experienced a classic breakout.

So what exactly is this mystery chart which appears to be in the early stages of a new leg higher?  Drumroll, please!  It’s actually the probability of President Trump winning re-election in November according to the website electionbettingodds.com.  At the current level of 53.1%, the market’s pricing of President Trump’s re-election has never been higher.

While President Trump’s chances of winning re-election have seen a big boost lately, these gains have also been accompanied by some interesting moves on the Democratic side.  Last Friday, a new Des Moines Register poll showed that Senator Bernie Sanders took the lead for the first time in its polling for the February 3rd Iowa caucus.  At 20% in the poll now, Sanders hardly has a commanding lead, and three other candidates are polling at 15%+ (Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden).  As a result of that poll, though, we saw a sharp drop in Biden’s chances of winning the nomination and further gains for Sanders after what has already been a strong showing in the last several weeks.

Whether the reasoning for Trump’s recent gains is that Sanders is less likely than Biden to win in a general election or that the party will be too divided to generate enough excitement around one candidate in a general election, the betting markets seem to be interpreting the recent surge in Sanders’ standing in the polls as a positive for President Trump’s re-election.  That’s a positive for Trump fans in the present, but just like technical analysis, the election betting markets haven’t exactly had a perfect record at predicting the outcome of events.  To read Bespoke’s most actionable stock market research, start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Premium.  You’ll unlock our most popular reports like our Morning Lineup, Model Portfolios, and Chart of the Day.