Last week, we highlighted how the Xtrackers CSI 300 ETF (ASHR) tracking Chinese A-Shares finally began to trend higher after being sandwiched between its 50 and 200-DMAs for most of 2021.  After that breakout, ASHR did not see much of a further move higher but fast forward to today and the ETF is surging once again. After a strong session overnight, ASHR has risen almost 4% today for its best single-day performance since July 6th of last year when the ETF popped 11.24%. As previously mentioned, ASHR had been stuck between its 50 and 200-DMAs for most of the time since late February, and as such, up until the past week it had not seen an overbought reading since February 19th. With the huge move today, ASHR is trading 3.45 standard deviations above its 50-DMA. As with the size of the move today, the last time that ASHR was as extended above its 50-DMA as it is now was in July of last year following the massive single-day July 6th surge.  Prior to that, you would have to go back to November 2016 to find as elevated of a reading.  Click here to view Bespoke’s premium membership options for our best research available.

After trading deep into oversold territory, the past two weeks have seen the ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) erase some of the losses of the past few months. Since the closing low on May 13th, ARKK has rallied a hair above 10%, although that still leaves it down over 30% from its 52-week high on February 12th.  As for the holdings of the ETF, on a year-to-date basis there are just 10 stocks that are still in the green in 2021.  Back in late January, nearly every ARKK holding was in the green.

Performance over the past week is essentially the inverse of year-to-date performance.  Whereas there are only a handful of stocks up YTD, there are only a handful that have fallen over the past five days.  Although it does not hold a large weight in the ETF (0.98%), by far the worst-performing stock has been Iovance Biotherapeutics (IOVA).  The stock was hit with a double whammy of bad news recently when the company announced the CEO, Maria Fardis, would be stepping down in addition to delaying its biologics license application until the first half of next year following feedback from the FDA.  That actually comes after a previous delay in the application back in October.  As for the rest of the ARKK cohort, Coinbase (COIN), HUYA (HUYA), and Proto Labs (PRLB) are the only other names down at least 5% in the past five days ending yesterday. On the other end of the spectrum, there are ten stocks that have rallied at least 10% in the same span.  Only one of these, Shopify (SHOP), has risen to more than one standard deviation above its 50-DMA while Sea (SE) is on the cusp of being able to say the same.

The charts of the ARKK holdings are all over the place ranging from still trending higher, to being in consolidation, to having totally collapsed.  For holdings like DraftKings (DKNG), ROKU (ROKU), Teradyne (TER), Trimble (TRMB), or Twitter (TWTR), the past few months of declines have brought price back down to around the past year’s uptrend lines or their 200-DMAs.  For others like Square (SQ), Sea (SE), or Tesla (TSLA), those long-term uptrends of the past year are less intact but the recent bounces have similarly come around their 200-DMAs or prior support from the lows earlier this year.  The snapshot above is from our Trend Analyzer tool that Bespoke Premium members have access to.  We have whited out two of the columns in the snapshot — our Trend and Timing scores.  To access these two proprietary indicators, be sure to start a two-week Bespoke Premium trial.  You’ll also have access to our Chart Scanner tool which is where the charts below are pulled from.

Consumer Confidence took a rest in May as the headline index dropped slightly falling from 117.5 (revised down from original 121.7) to 117.2 and more than a point and a half below consensus forecasts of 118.8.  Despite the weaker than expected report, confidence levels have recovered more than half of the declines from the pre-COVID highs.

One very strong aspect of the report this morning was the Jobs Plentiful index which surged 29% versus April, marking the third straight m/m gain of over 19% during which time the index has doubled.  That’s easily the largest ever three-month gain in the index. Jobs are so plentiful now that the index is actually higher than it was back in February 2020 when people were still figuring out what COVID was right before the WHO declared it a pandemic in March 2020.  With a record number of job openings per the JOLTS survey and consumers viewing the ability to find a job just as easy now as it was before the pandemic, it once again leads back to the question of why there are 8.2 million fewer Americans working now than there were in February 2020?

On another note, it’s really just a matter of semantics at this point, but since the mid-1960s there has never been another period where the Jobs Plentiful index erased this much of its losses and the economy was still in a recession.  The NBER is the organization in charge of dating recession start and end dates, and while it isn’t meant in any way to be a timing indicator, at this point the recession is not only over, but it has been for about a year now. Going back to 1980, the median number of days between the end of a recession and when the NBER makes the official announcement is 476 days.  Based on that, we could expect the NBER announcement to come out sometime later this Summer.  Click here to view Bespoke’s premium membership options for our best research available.