Sunday, August 30, 2009

It's a train



(Richard Arms developed the TRIN, or Arms index, as a contrarian indicator to detect overbought and oversold levels in the market. Because of its calculation method, the TRIN has an inverse relationship with the market. Generally, a rising TRIN is bearish and a falling TRIN is bullish.{stockcharts.com} -AM)

By Brett Steenbarger
Seeking Alpha
August 29

A few readers have asked this question, noting recent low TRIN values. (TRIN is also known as the ARMS Index). Of course, what this means is that a high proportion of daily trading volume has been concentrated in rising stocks.

But is TRIN low?

To address this, I looked at the median 20-day TRIN values going back to 2000. I used the median because the TRIN ratio is constructed in such a way that you can get much larger readings above 1.0 than below. With the median, I wanted to capture whether the average day was showing greater concentration of volume to the winning or losing stocks.

Guess what? The current 20-day median TRIN is the lowest value we've seen since 2000 at around .75.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of that.

What I can tell you with certainty is that two of the past historical occasions in which we've had 20-day price highs and ultra low median 20-day TRIN readings have been March 2000 and late May/early June, 2007. Both corresponded more or less to bull market peaks.

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