THE BIG IDEA
Our friend Swingy is walking around with his “money hat” on. A +9 on his Swingex Index gets him excited like few other things in life can.
It is not often that the index gets as high as it is now. The last time was at the depths of the Trump tariff meltdown in April last year. If you recall, that turned out to be an excellent time to be a buyer of stocks.
Now, not everybody is as jazzed up about the market as Swingy. There is at least one writer at Market Watch with a different point of view. Check out this headline:
Before we get too deep into this, let’s review all the previous +9s since the inception of the index in April 2021.
You might have noticed two things from the results.
First, the outcomes range from a short-term burst higher to an awesome bull run. The market reliably goes up, at least for a while.
Second, most of the +9 days happened during the 2022 bear market. That is also when market rallies fizzled out. Even in bear markets, there are tradable countertrend moves, and the Swingex Index showed us where the buy points were.
The truth is, it is easy to relate to headlines like the one from Market Watch. Look at all these things going wrong:
Oil near $100 per barrel
Each of the Magnificent 7 stocks is down for the year
The private credit market is having the equivalent of a bank run
And any or all of those “could” get worse. Maybe oil goes to $150. The Mag 7 stocks can go down even more. Problems with private credit could spill over into the banking system. Or maybe none of that happens.
At each of the other occasions when the index hit +9, there was something scaring the market. One of the benefits of the Swingex Index is it gives you the courage to jump in when the situation looks terrible.
Now is the time to get put money to work. The coming days and weeks will reveal whether the market will give us only a short bump higher or something more durable.
SEEN ON THE INTERNETS
The McClellan Oscillator. It sounds like something from science fiction. In fact, it was created in 1969, the same year as the first moon landing, so maybe the name was inspired by that.
In reality, it is an indicator of the ebbs and flows of advancing versus declining stocks on the New York Stock Exchange.
Tom McClellan, custodian of his parents’ invention, recently pointed out on social media that the indicator is back down to the level seen at the peak of last spring’s tariff mayhem.
His post on Friday included data through Thursday the 12th. Below we will copy in the same chart updated through Friday, as it appears on McClellan’s website.
The gist of the interpretation (my interpretation, anyway) in the current context is this: when the indicator is strongly negative, it means that many stocks are retreating and the retreat is intensifying. In other words - panic!
You can see from McClellan’s chart that big negative numbers coincide with local bottoms. The oscillator can go even lower before things turn around, however.
NUMBERS ONLY
66.99 | NAAIM’s weekly index shows that professional money managers are the least invested in the market that they have been since last April. |
18 years | The CEO of Adobe Systems (ADBE), who had been on the job since George W. Bush was president, announced he was stepping down. The stock fell 7.58% on the news. |
- 4.48% | The price of oil may be up, but stocks in the Oil Equipment & Services index were down 4.48% last week. |
SWINGEX INDEX
As of market close on: 13 March 2026
Swingy says: Been a while since I put on my money hat. Put yours on, too, and get busy!
Learn more about how the Swingex Index works here.
WATCHER
Stocks highlighted here each week are not recommendations to buy or sell. They are provided as ideas for swing traders to follow up on with their own research.
FTDR (Frontdoor): The company that provides online home repair assistance is our Watcher pick for this week.
Frontdoor’s recent earnings report sent the stock back up to the upper $60s, where it had been living last autumn. It might have stuck there or even headed higher if not for other developments pulling down the whole market. The slow drift lower has at least been orderly and ordinary. There is nothing company-specific that is spooking investors.
At this point, RSI(2) is down to 4.20 and so the stock is primed to go much higher, at least temporarily.
If the mood of the market improves, look for this one to quickly turn back toward $70.