Saturday, April 11, 2020

"Stocks will revisit their coronavirus crash low, and here’s when to expect it"

The views expressed are those of the author, Mark Hulbert.
We just happen to agree, on the eventual revisit if not the timing.
As they teach on day one of junior analyst school, "If you are going public with a target, don't publish a date."
They really stress that.

From MarketWatch:

U.S. market history points to a final bottom in August 
Is the great coronavirus bear market of 2020 now history? Many exuberant bulls would have you believe that it is, since the S&P 500 SPX, +1.44% is now more than 20% higher than its mid-March low. That satisfies the semi-official definition of a bull market.

So in that narrow sense, the bulls are right. But in a broader sense, I consider their arguments to be a triumph of hope over experience. If by definition we’re in a new bull market, the question we should be asking is different: Will the stock market hit a new low later this year, lower than where it stood at the March low?

I’m convinced the answer is “yes.” My study of past bear markets revealed a number of themes, each of which points to the March low being broken in coming weeks or months.
While the market’s rally since its March 23 low has been explosive, it’s not unprecedented. Since the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.22% was created in the late 1800s, there have been 38 other occasions where it rallied just as much (or more) in just as short a period — and all of them occurred during the Great Depression.

Such ominous parallels are a powerful reminder that the market can explode upward during the context of a devastating long-term decline. Consider the bull- and bear-market calendar maintained by Ned Davis Research. According to it, there were no fewer than six bull markets between the 1929 stock market crash and the end of the 1930s. I doubt an investor interviewed in 1939 about his experience of the Great Depression would have highlighted those bull markets....
....MUCH MORE

What Mr. Hulbert is doing here is basic algorithmic trading stuff where you take past data and use it to try to shade the odds a little bit in your favor.
The next step up is some of the black box AI magic that attempts to tease out correlations that humans don't perceive.
The next step down from the algo stuff is to grab your calculator and add up all the stimulus monies, subtract all the economic losses and hope you have a positive number.
We aren't there yet. The measures taken so far are just liquidity pumps aimed at keeping the economy's head above water.
Stay tuned.