Saturday, September 09, 2006

Where are the Leaders?

Part of the problem of the market right now is that it has no real leadership to speak of. Where are the leaders and what are they doing?

In the NYSE the commodities had held the throne for most of the year, especially the energy and metal sectors. Both are currently languishing, with most of the related stocks even below their 50dma. In the Nasdaq, we started out the year with leaders such as GOOG HANS GRMN AAPL SNDK BIDU NTRI AAPL SHLD RIMM. More than half of the latter now are below the 50dma (and many of these are on our short list). An acephalous market cannot make any kind of meaningful long-term move; what is necessary is that either a new crop of leaders emerges or that there is a sector rotation, something that we still have not seen this year (and no, NVEC does not count as a new leader :-)