Bearish warnings, but no trigger

Preface: Explaining our market timing models
We maintain several market timing models, each with differing time horizons. The "Ultimate Market Timing Model" is a long-term market timing model based on the research outlined in our post, Building the ultimate market timing model. This model tends to generate only a handful of signals each decade.

The Trend Asset Allocation Model is an asset allocation model which applies trend following principles based on the inputs of global stock and commodity price. This model has a shorter time horizon and tends to turn over about 4-6 times a year. In essence, it seeks to answer the question, "Is the trend in the global economy expansion (bullish) or contraction (bearish)?"

My inner trader uses a trading model, which is a blend of price momentum (is the Trend Model becoming more bullish, or bearish?) and overbought/oversold extremes (don't buy if the trend is overbought, and vice versa). Subscribers receive real-time alerts of model changes, and a hypothetical trading record of the those email alerts are updated weekly here. The hypothetical trading record of the trading model of the real-time alerts that began in March 2016 is shown below.

The latest signals of each model are as follows:

• Ultimate market timing model: Sell equities*
• Trend Model signal: Neutral*
• Trading model: Bearish*

* The performance chart and model readings have been delayed by a week out of respect to our paying subscribers.

Update schedule: I generally update model readings on my site on weekends and tweet mid-week observations at @humblestudent. Subscribers receive real-time alerts of trading model changes, and a hypothetical trading record of the those email alerts is shown here.

Subscribers can access the latest signal in real-time here.


Island reversal signal intact
A little over a week ago, the market traced out a bearish island reversal formation after violating a rising trend line. While the bullish island reversal signal in April saw the market advance immediately afterwards, the aftermath of the most recent signal resolved itself in a sideways consolidation, indicating that the bulls still had some life left in them, and they were struggling to maintain control of the tape.

Nevertheless, market internals revealed a number of bearish setups, with no obvious trigger. As an example, there is a divergence between the VIX Index and VVIX, which is the volatility of the VIX. I interpret this to mean that VVIX is not buying the recent fall in the VIX, and it is discounting an increase in volatility, which tends to be inversely correlated with stock prices.

The full post can be found here.