Outlook Grows Surprisingly Bullish

Over the weekend we scanned stocks making fresh 52-week highs and then we examined these stocks from four separate time frames. We were quite surprised by the results. A little background is in order before we get into more details though. Mid summer this year the market outlook was about as dire as it had been in some time. The market for two years had been bumping up against overhead resistance and was contained in a depressingly tight range, which made trend trading all but impossible to profit from. The first part of this year had the market in a steady decline, which made it look as if the Fed's interest rate hikes were about to send the market into the next leg down from the bear market which had begun in 2001. Just when it looked like the bottom was about to fall out though, stocks rallied. The rally had many problems in its early stages, which we pointed out in detail in this report. However, as the rally continued, it firmed up and stocks started to behave better than we have seen them behave over the past two years that the market has been caught in its trading range. Getting back to this weekend's scans. Scan criteria included: stocks that are trading between $1-$50; which trade at least 250,000 shares per day; which are also making fresh 52-week highs. An astounding 489 stocks met these parameters. This is up from only 50-60 just a few months ago. Nevertheless, the QQQQ is back at major overhead resistance and the market is overbought. This gives us some pause. What perked up our interest even more though was when we scanned through each of these 489 stocks on their 5-year weekly charts. What we found when we did this were not a group of stocks undergoing distribution and bumping up against resistance. Instead, we found a large majority of these stocks already breaking out to fresh 5-year highs; trading firmly above resistance. Moreover, most of these stocks are not in the process of exhaustion-type moves, but are instead just steadily moving up on solid volume and solid technicals. Keeping our feet on the ground. We can't lose our heads here and grow Pollyannaish about the future outlook since this market remains due for a correction. But, if the QQQQ can keep chipping away at resistance and if the group of leaders in our scans can continue to build on their gains over the next couple of weeks, we may indeed be looking at the onset of a major multi-year bull move, the likes of which we have not enjoyed for two grueling years. We are keeping our fingers crossed and will admit we were wrong if bullish moves start to fail this week.