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Mark Hulbert Archives | Email alerts
Nov. 29, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) "” Shorter-term pain, longer-term gain.
I've been reporting in recent weeks that the market still had downside work to do to overcome the excessive optimism that was ushered in by the October rally. Despite Monday's impressive rally, that remains the judgment of contrarian analysis.
But sentiment is a short-term indicator, with relevance to the market's direction over the next couple of weeks at most. And when we focus instead on trends measured in months, if not years, there have been some encouraging developments.
One is the recent behavior of corporate insiders. When I last checked in on what these officers, directors and largest shareholders were doing in early November, they were selling shares of their companies' stock at an above-average pace. ( Read my Nov. 8 column on corporate insiders. )
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, saw online sales of $816 million, and another strong Cyber Monday could already be in the works, according to comScore, which tracks online holiday spending.
That was a source of concern, to be sure, but not as alarming as it might have otherwise been. That's because their selling came in the wake of October's strong rally, and it is entirely normal for insiders to accelerate the pace of their selling when the market rises.
To find out if the insiders were really bearish on their companies' prospects, we needed to see how they would react to a decline. If they continued selling at a heightened pace, that would suggest that they wanted to get out of their companies' shares at any price "” which would be a very bad omen indeed.
Fortunately for the bulls, that's not how the insiders have responded to the weakness that has ensued so far this month.
Consider the number of shares that insiders sold last week to the number that they bought. According to the Vickers Weekly Insider Report, published by Argus Research, this sell-to-buy ratio dropped to an especially low 0.81-to-1 "” well below the ratio's long-term average of between 2-to-1 and 2.5-to-1.
Lest you think this means the market is immediately poised to start rallying, however, bear in mind that the last time this average was this low and bullish was in late August "” five weeks prior to the market's Oct. 3 low. Given the cautionary signals being emitted by contrarian analysis, it would not be surprising for a broadly similar scenario to play itself out again in coming weeks.
The bottom line? The downside work that the market needs to undertake over the next couple of weeks is likely not to be the beginning of a major new leg down.
Click here to learn more about the Hulbert Financial Digest.
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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