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Mark Hulbert Archives | Email alerts
Nov. 16, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) "” The stock market appears to be going nowhere fast.
Not only is the market, as of mid-November, more or less where it stood at the beginning of the month, trading volume has been unusually light.
And that has some analysts worried. If a new bull market did indeed begin at the early October lows, as some commentators argue, and if volume had picked up as much as it did in prior bull markets, then we should be seeing markedly higher trading volume right now.
Trading volume in the latest so-called bull market is nowhere near as high as in prior rallies, according to MarketWatch's Mark Hulbert, who says a lot of major moves upward come with a thrust in volume. (Image: Getty Images)
That we're not suggests to some that the rise since the October lows is more likely to be a bear market rally than the beginning of a major new bull market.
To find out how worried we should be, I analyzed stock-exchange volume at the beginning of all bull markets since the early 1970s. I relied on the precise definition of a bull market that is employed by Ned Davis Research, the quantitative research firm, according to which there have been 10 bull markets since the mid 1970s.
For each of these bull markets, I calculated a ratio of two numbers: The first is average daily NYSE trading volume over the first six weeks of that bull market, and the second is the average over the six weeks prior to the bull market's beginning (that is, in the last six weeks of the preceding bear market). I chose these six-week windows because that is how much time has passed since the early October lows.
Across all 10 past bull markets, this ratio's average was 2.15 to 1. That means that trading volume was more than twice as high in the first six weeks of the average past bull market than in the six weeks of the preceding bear market.
How does this compare to what we're experiencing today? The ratio of average daily trading volume in the six weeks since the October low to the average in the six weeks prior to that was 1.87 to 1 "” 13% lower than this ratio's average and lower than the minimum this ratio has been at the beginning of any of the last 10 bull markets.
Ned Davis Research measures volume trends differently, but reaches the same conclusion. The firm calculates a ratio of volume's 50-day moving average to its 200-day average. This ratio currently stands at 1.04-to-1. In contrast, according to the firm, the best stock market gains historically have been produced when this ratio is above 1.05-to-1.
To be sure, regardless of which way volume is measured, recent volume is only slightly to moderately below the minimum we would expect if the last six weeks represented the beginning of a new bull market.
So light trading volume raises more concerns than outright alarms.
At a minimum, though, recent volume trends suggests that "” regardless of what we call it "” the six-week-old rally is not a particularly strong one.
Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980.
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Mark Hulbert is editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, which since 1980 has been tracking the performance of hundreds of investment advisors. The HFD... Expand
Mark Hulbert is editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, which since 1980 has been tracking the performance of hundreds of investment advisors. The HFD became a service of MarketWatch in April 2002. In addition to being a Senior Columnist for MarketWatch, Hulbert writes a monthly column for Barron's.com and a column on investment strategies for the Journal of the American Association of Individual Investors. A frequent guest on television and radio shows, you may have seen Hulbert on CNBC, Wall Street Week, or ABC's World News This Morning. Most recently, Dow Jones and MarketWatch launched a new weekly newsletter based on Hulbert's research, entitled Hulbert on Markets: What's Working Now. Collapse
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