Frequently, when the market is making a bottom one or more sectors has already made a bottom and is breaking out on the upside. A quick perusal of my sector charts, the list comes from decisionpoint.com., shows only one sector to be breaking out and that is Gold Stocks. GDM or GDX is behaving very nicely and in an earlier post, I discussed its bullish behavior. By far the weakest last week was the insurance stock index.
Looking through the Decisionpoint chartbook of ETF's shows gdx and slv to be the strongest and the financial stocks--SKF and regional banks RKH to be among the very weakest.
Very graphically the analysis of sectors demonstrates a movement from financial intermediaries to precious metals as a store of value. This cannot be bullish for equities in general. The lack of any other leadership confirms the bearish conclusions we made in discussing markets 1/25/09 in general.
