Chart Talk {09.28.18}

Today is the final trading day of the third quarter and here's an updated chart of the S&P 500's ETF SPY for 2018.  This part of the market is up nicely even if leadership in the index is more narrow than many would like.  The index is trading now slightly below its most recent high.  September is supposed to be one of the weakest months of the year for stocks, yet right now this index is trading more or less flat for the month.  September is separated on the chart above by that purple line running from the top to the bottom on the right side.  In fact this year the market's most seasonal period of weakness {April-October} has so far seen a nice rally in SPY.  

Now we still need to get through October and the upcoming elections.  But if we get through this period unscathed and if we don't have any unexpected news crossing the transom then there is a higher probability of stocks rallying into year's end.  Traditionally November and December are pretty good months for the markets and stories of institutional money managers badly trailing their benchmarks are starting to percolate throughout the industry.  This means those folks are going to be in catch up mode in the last part of 2018 and will need to buy stocks.

No guarantees of course and we have to see what happens with the elections and what comes from the news flows.  However, it will be hard to ignore these seasonal trends if we make it through the next 4-6 weeks with a very good economy and no bad news.  

Stay tuned!

Back Tuesday.  Chart is from Tradingview.com, although the annotations are mine.  Also you can double-click on the chart above to make it larger.

*Long ETFs related to the S&P 500 in client and personal accounts.