In a post yesterday, we highlighted the fact that based on trading in the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), the odds for the Democratic nominee to win the Presidential election in November were crashing.  We pointed out that while other betting markets were moving in a similar direction, they weren’t seeing nearly as sharp a move as the IEM.  A case in point is the betting market Betfair.  The chart below shows the historical price of the contract for Hillary Clinton winning the November election.  Similar to the IEM, Mrs. Clinton’s chances have been declining in the last few weeks, falling from 74.4% in late April to 66.0% today.  Unlike the IEM, though, the price decline hasn’t been nearly as sharp and remains comfortably above 60%.

Like our chart of the IEM, in this chart for the Betfair contract, we have also overlaid the performance of the S&P 500 so far this year.  Here again, the patterns of both series have been remarkably similar.  Tuesday’s rally in equities would suggest to some that either Clinton will see a bounce or the relationship is breaking, but until we can convincingly break that downtrend from the April closing high, the relationship remains intact.

Oil continues to trade in a very well-defined uptrend channel.  Since making its bear market low of $26.21 on February 11th (the same day the stock market bottomed as well), the price of oil has rallied 85.16% up to its current level of $48.53.  A bull market is defined as a 20%+ rally that was preceded by a 20%+ decline, and the current bull market for oil has now lasted 103 calendar days.

Below is a list of all oil bull markets since 1983.  Again, these are 20%+ rallies that were preceded by a 20%+ decline.  For comparison’s sake, at the bottom of the table, we highlight the average and median gain and length of all oil bull markets.  Notably, the current bull market for oil has already eclipsed the average and median bull in terms of price change.  With a gain of 85%, this oil bull is nearly 23 percentage points stronger than the average oil bull, and it’s nearly 50 percentage points stronger than the median oil bull!  In terms of length, though, this bull has been just half as long as the average bull and 40 days less than the median bull.  On both a median and average basis, bull markets in oil have been much shorter in duration than bull markets of other asset classes like equities or gold.

The Nasdaq 100 is only up a couple percentage points off its recent lows, but the average stock in the index is actually up 8% off its 30-day closing low.  Below is a list of the Nasdaq 100 stocks up the most off their 30-day lows.  (Note that we’re using 30-day lows since most of these stocks have put in short-term bottoms within the last few weeks, but they’ve come on different trading days.)

As shown, NetEase (NTES) and NVIDIA (NVDA) have been absolute beasts, rallying 30%+.  Monster Beverage (MNST), Endo International (ENDP) and Electronic Arts (EA) rank third, fourth, and fifth with gains of 22%+.  Other notables on the list include Amazon (AMZN) — up 19.4%, Netflix (NFLX) — up 15.2%, Facebook (FB) — up 10.5%, and Apple (AAPL) — up 9.1%.

Last week’s FOMC minutes sure weren’t kind to the price of gold.  Since the release of those minutes on 5/18, gold hasn’t had a single up day, declining by nearly 3%.  With today’s 1% decline, it is now poised to close below its 50-day moving average for the first time since 4/22 and has also broken its short-term uptrend in the process.  Granted, the long-term technical picture for gold still looks attractive, but for now, it seems to be establishing an extended sideways range.