In last night’s Closer, we noted the recent price action of copper.  Over the past several months, copper had been consistently moving lower in a solid downtrend, but that downtrend has been broken this week.  Finishing up about 1% in yesterday’s session, copper had its first close above resistance which would suggest a further move higher.  We’re seeing additional gains today as the commodity continues to break out.  Over the next few weeks, copper bulls will look for a series of higher highs and higher lows that would eventually form a new uptrend.  Start a two-week free trial to one of our three membership levels for Bespoke’s most actionable research.

For the first time since last October, Steel Dynamics (STLD) closed above its 200-DMA yesterday. This comes after the stock has remained in a long term downtrend over the past year after the first round of tariffs on steel were imposed.  Although the company is not out of the woods yet on the political front, this long term downtrend was broken earlier this summer. Afterward, the stock pulled back to retest its downtrend.  STLD then made a higher low at the end of August (8/27), and has since risen over 23%. In the process, STLD not only took out its 50-day moving average, but it also closed marginally above its 200-DMA, holding above there today.

Even with the recent move higher, STLD’s yield remains attractive.  With a current yield of just under 3%—$0.24 per share paid quarterly—the dividend yield is higher than both the average for the broader S&P 1500 and the Materials sector which are 1.76% and 1.96%, respectively. In regards to other S&P 1500 steel companies, along with Nucor (NUE), STLD has the joint highest dividend yield. The growth rate of STLD’s dividend has also outpaced the sector dramatically.  The dividend grew by 24.82% over the past year and 13.7% over the past five years.  By both measures, this is nearly twice the growth rate of other stocks in the sector. That growth has been in spite of the past year and a half’s trade headwinds. Furthermore, with the dividend payout ratio at 27.36%, the company still has plenty of cushion to pay shareholders in the event that earnings do decline.  Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to access our interactive Security Analysis tool and much more.

This week has been all about little is big and big is little in terms of stock performance.  Take the lists of best and worst performing S&P 1500 stocks since last Friday’s close.  The first table below shows the 20 best performing S&P 1500 stocks since the close last Friday.  The fact that there are more than 20 stocks in the S&P 1500 that are up over 20% already this week is notable in itself.  Even crazier, though, is that when you look at the share prices of these stocks, all but seven have current share prices of less than $5 per share even after their gains this week, and the average share price of the 20 stocks listed is just $7.42.  Also, as we noted in an earlier post, it’s not as if there are tons of stocks in the S&P 1500 trading below $5 per share.  Heading into today, there were only 55 and 54 of them were up on the week.

Turning to the list of losers so far this week, while there are more than 20 stocks that are up over 20%, not a single stock in the index is down 20% and only eight are down more than 10%.  Besides the fact that the stocks listed below are down so far this week and the ones above are up, the other major and pretty consistent difference between the two lists is their share prices.  As of today, the average price of the 20 biggest losers so far this week is $135.74 which is more than 18 times the average share price of the biggest week to date winners. Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Premium for our most actionable investment ideas.

As the S&P 500 broke and held above its August range in the past week, sentiment has shifted more positive.  The percentage of investors reporting as bullish in AAII’s weekly survey rose from 28.64% last week up to 33.13%.  That is the highest since August 1st when 38.44% reported bullish sentiment. With two consecutive weeks of improvements, bullish sentiment is now well off of its lows from the second week of August (21.66%) and is back within a normal range relative to its historical average of 38%. This week marks the sixth straight week with below average bullish sentiment.

Inverse to bullish sentiment, bearish sentiment is now the lowest that it has been since the first week of August.  With bearish sentiment falling 8.26 percentage points this week to 31.25%, it was the largest drop since June 13th’s 8.38 percentage point decline.

Although most of the loss in bearish sentiment went to bulls, a predominant share of investors remain neutral.  Ticking up to 35.63% this week, neutral sentiment remains above its historical average (31.52%) as it has for five weeks in a row and 31 of the total 36 weeks this year.  This was also the first time that neutral sentiment has outweighed both bulls and bears since the end of July. Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to access our interactive economic indicators monitor and much more.

We have all heard the saying one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When it comes to literal garbage stocks — Waste Management (WM) and Republics Services (RSG) — that saying is more than applicable today. After trading in strong uptrends this year through August, both WM and RSG have had a rough September with month-to-date declines of 4.9% and 3.5%, respectively.  The strong performance YTD and big drops this month puts these stocks in good company with the rest of the momentum world.  Recent declines brought both stocks to the bottom of their trading ranges as each closed yesterday in extremely oversold territory (over 2 standard deviations below their 50-DMAs). Given the strong long-term uptrends and this pullback, RSG and WM earned perfect timing scores in our Trend Analyzer tool. Today, those declines have ceased as the stocks found support at prior lows that were first established in the spring.  Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to access our Trend Analyzer, Security Analysis tool, and much more.