How far can stocks pull back?

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 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: Buy equities*
• Trend Model signal: Bullish*
• Trading model: Bullish*

* 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 those email alerts is shown here.

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


The ketchup effect

The bulls suffered a setback when the S&P 500 violated a minor rising uptrend (dotted line), though secondary uptrend support (solid line) is holding at 3640. Before anyone panics, the uptrends in the S&P 500 and breadth indicators are intact. In all likelihood, the market is just undergoing a period of consolidation since the start of December.

The Swedes call it ketchupeffekt, or the ketchup effect. It's what happens when you try to pour ketchup on food. Nothing happens for a long time, then it all happens at once. The market weakness of last week is a display of ketchupeffekt. Suddenly, all the bad news is happening at once. If this is indeed the start of a pullback, how bad can it get?

Let's explore the downside scenarios.

The full post can be found here.