Cobra's Market View

Up 3 weeks in a row, the next week has 81% chances to make a higher high.

Rare and unusual:
“BlackRock [BLK] says it lowered Laurence Fink’s pay as the firm’s financial results fell short of expectations and funds designed to beat markets underperformed.” [WSJ]

ELSEWHERE:
File your tax form for FREE via the IRS’ old “Free File program” which very few people use.
H&R Block and Intuit [who owns TurboTax and QuickBooks] spent $6.6 million lobbying against this last year. They want to ban the IRS from offering its own free, simple tax filing service.
https://www.propublica.org/article/cong ... k-turbotax

This is cool, updates daily, but how do you use it?
Just for OB, OS?
Can anyone suggest how to replicate it on stockcharts.com with a SPY overlay??
Click on “3 years” and see the last time it was this high was Jan 2018, AND THAT WAS AN IMPORTANT TOP, so it’s worthwhile figuring it out.
Comments please
http://www.sentimentreport.com/?period=365

Dr Al, the only sentiment chart I could find is this one (StockCharts prevents the chart image to show here)
https://stockcharts.com/public/1169350/tenpp/7
https://c.stockcharts.com/c-sc/sc?s=%24 ... 74929&r=40

Arthur Hills lists the sentiment indicators here
https://stockcharts.com/articles/mailba ... harts.html

FWIW
The weekly and daily Zahorcheck Measures !BINYZM2DW !BINYZM2D for $NYSE are now at +10 on a range from Bearish -15 to Bullish +15
Background info and sample charts are here:
https://stockcharts.com/articles/dancin ... =binyzm2dw

I have a Jim dandy crackerjack of a sentiment indicator.
Lipper Analytics Equity funds flow.
Jan 1 to the week of April 3, net outflows of 19.7 Billion Dollars. Week of 4/3 to 4/10 inflows of 4.3 Billion Dollars.
So as we closed in on S&P 2900 John Q Public switched from sell to buy.

If you are really new to this game it is a truism that the general public tends to buy the most at tops and sell the most at bottoms.

Must read article at the evil site. An in depth Q&A with the man who runs Goldman's buyback desk.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04- ... all-street

To me the three big takeaways were:
1. During earnings blackout buybacks drop by around 30%. So Gandalf was wrong in his recent piece. What happens is if you have set in place a safe harbor plan (safe from SEC) specifying how, how much and when before you know what prices are you can keep buying while running blind.
2. Purchases are generally no more than 10% of the average daily float. I would like to see a study showing the percentage difference in terms of the daily float so I can put that number in context, but on the surface it certainly explains how some companies can go up and up and up.
3. They do buy more than usual when prices are unusually low.

Over at Real Investment Advice Lance Roberts is predicting that the government will once again outlaw buybacks. He thinks that as usual it won't be until after a major market meltdown leaves a large part of the economy in "smoking ruins" and the public becomes outraged. He cites a fun number by the way, that in 1980 the typical CEO made 50 times what the typical production line worker was making. Then buybacks got going. Now it is around 144 times as much and most of the change is in the form of stock.

I am aware that when it comes to buybacks I am starting to sound like a speaker at a temperance rally. But they account for most of the gains in the market. They have pretty much eliminated the ability of the market to set prices on a day to day basis. Many companies have loaded up on debt so that the executives could be paid over 100% of the free cash flow. Human emotions do not change. Executive greed as well as the herd instinct and recency bias (everyone is doing it and we have been doing this for several years) have all contributed to this widespread bad idea. It will become clear if the Fed falters and we enter a recession. Then the greatly heightened per share numbers from all those buybacks (financial engineering) will hype the down side volatility.

From "It is what it is department"No one can argue that short term trend is up, and up in all time frames besides monthly where LH can still possible. This week is GAP focus, weekly gap will be filled but when? no one knows, look at last year weekly gap after a breakout, this could go quite a bit longer so...don't be overly aggressive on the short side.Another GAPthat I pay attention to is daily gap at the over bought area, using $ONE:$VIX BB. we were not just have a full range gap up at overbought area, the total put/call index $CPC also pointing to complacent level. for short term day trade like me, I will find excuse to sell in a coming days, but realizing that dip will be bought, Peace!

THANKS TO TSF AND TRADES WITH CATS
Please post anything you see from Nomura's Charlie McElligott
As you know, he’s our current “Boy Wonder” (until he stumbles)….
The other quants laughed at him.
He was right.
He nailed the December short and the January long.
(I’m trying to stay away from zh, so I fear I’ll miss some valuable McElligott posts)

Dr Al,

With inflation insurance back in vogue, should bond investors be worried?
Published: Apr 13, 2019
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with- ... 2019-04-12

“The Fed is looking to run the jobs market superhot going-forward through said ‘policy asymmetry’…in order to reset inflation expectations,”
wrote Charles McElligott, a cross-asset strategist at Nomura Securities.

The above article has other big names.