Do not be fooled by the headlines or talking heads on TV. I am a great believer in Technical Analysis but I'm not a day trader. I look at trends in technical data from as short as 14 days to as long as 1 year plus a whole lot of technical trends with time frames in between.
You can never predict the market but you can surely analyze which way it is trending and plan your portfolio management to contain trending stocks. For me I like to see trends in the Market as measured by the Russell 3000 Index and the Value Line Arithmetic Index. My earliest trend is which way their 14 day turtle channels are trending.
Today 54.37% of the stocks were trading above their 20 day moving averages, 62.68% were trading below their 50 day moving averages.
The Russell 3000 Index is an index containing the 3000 of the largest stocks in capitalization. These are the stocks that the majority of institutional investors, mutual funds and Wall Street analysts follow and where most of you have your money. It is a cap weighted index. I analyze and chart the Index the way I do stocks. As you can see below the 14 day turtle channel is not hitting higher highs and higher lows so I don't think the Market has rallied:
Barchart technical indicators:
The Value Line Arithmetic Index is the other Market index I follow. It contains the 1700 largest stocks that are also included in the Russell 3000 Index but it is not capital weighted so each stock has an equal weighting and you get a slightly different view of the market. You can see that this index is still trading below its 20 day moving average but it also is not hitting higher highs and higher lows yet.