ChartSmarter Friday Game Plan 12/3/17

Markets once again at the expense of a broken record trading in a very taut range and close to the UNCH mark. The S&P 500 finished higher by .1 and the Nasdaq lost .1%. Heading into Friday both benchmarks are trading lower with the Nasdaq down .4% and the S&P 500 by .6%, but both are recording inside weeks. If you look at the glass half empty you would say they are registering bearish haramis with one day left. Each of them have been closing in the upper half of the weekly range, a bullish sign. However successful investors are always wondering about how much they could lose. If you wanted to paint a negative brush on markets presently one could say that as impressive as the bulls have been swimming just off all time highs, and the longer this tape continues this way the onus is on the bulls for the burden of proof to continue this uptrend. The bulls can point to the performance of markets after the month of January failing to trade negative. For only the seventh time in history, h/t @JLyonsFundMgmt, it happened last month and for the year end returns following it averaged 13.6% (of course there will surely be sizable drawdowns during the year and this cater to longer term investors obviously). Looking into market internals for Thursday growth investors were not festive as the clear leaders were staples and utilities. Perhaps investors are no longer under the belief that 4 interest rate increases are on the table for 2017. Below is the chart of COST, which seems almost like a staple immune to the retails flimsiness, and how it appeared in our Monday 1/23 Game Plan. It blasted above a cup with handle trigger of 165.05 today and is higher 9 of the last 12 weeks and this week by 3.6% thus far.