Friday closed higher across the board. The S&P 500 gained 0.58%, the equal-weight version 0.56%, the Dow 0.83%, the Nasdaq 0.63% and the Russell 2000 0.46%, and the S&P 500 sits back within 0.1% of Tuesday’s record close. Treasuries saw modest pressure and yields edged higher, with the market pricing Fed hikes for December 9 and March 17. Brent slipped 0.2%, gold jumped 1.5% and silver 2.5%. Parts of tech rebounded from Thursday’s slump over the OpenAI revenue debate, but the chip index extended its losses and Apple fell on a report of iPhone order cuts. SpaceX’s spectrum purchase hit the mobile carriers and lifted the tower stocks, Humana jumped on its Medicare ratings, and Delta closed flat after a margin squeeze from fuel costs. The Michigan sentiment reading could have been worse. The week ahead brings the September CPI on Wednesday, the PPI on Thursday, the big bank earnings and ASML and TSMC. Our cycle model, meanwhile, has the Hang Seng at the bullish maximum, and momentum has already turned with it.
The model’s floor calls drew their first price answers this week. The Hang Seng, whose ceiling window opened on September 3 and paid 6% to Thursday’s low, now posts +100, the bullish maximum of the scale, with a bear exit, the sellers have left the field and the decline appears finished, and it closed Friday 1.8% higher. That is a completed round trip, a ceiling called near the top five weeks ago and a floor now flagged at the top of the bullish scale with momentum behind it. The long-bond ETF took the 77.28 mark from Wednesday’s article on Thursday and closed Friday 1.1% above Monday’s low. The financials, read at the bearish maximum on September 3 near their high, fell 7.2% to September 30 and enter the floor side today at +68, a reading the model already counts as a possible floor, with a bear exit of their own. On the ceiling side corn, read at the bearish maximum of -100 with a bull exit on September 26 (the buyers step back, the rise no longer carries), closed Friday 11.7% below its September 21 high and has left the zone. Wheat lost 4.7% in three sessions to its lowest close since August. Solana, filed on Wednesday as the one alarm without an answer, fell 9.4% in the three sessions since. The one reading that left without paying is the euro’s, bullish since September 9 on rising cycles alone, which dropped out of the zone this week with the price at a one-year low.
What the board says today is that the floor side has started to pay. The Hang Seng’s reading is the first bullish maximum with an exit since Shanghai’s on September 24, and gold and the financials carry exits as well. Four more windows sit at +93, a step below the top of the bullish scale, with bear fatigue, the downward move is grinding to a halt, in the long-bond ETF, the real estate sector, silver and platinum. On the ceiling side the whole yield curve has moved up a stage to -93, deep on the topping side, with bull fatigue, the bulls are losing interest and the upward move is getting tired, on data that show the ten-, twenty- and thirty-year yields off their highs of Monday and Wednesday. The bond market is still being called from both sides, and this time both sides have moved a step.
Our daily analysis filters roughly 45 markets through a cycle consensus engine. Each asset receives a Consensus Score from -100 to +100, the model’s summary reading for a possible turn, where positive values mark potential cyclical bottoms (a time window where a decline could end) and negative values potential cyclical tops (a window where a rise could stall or reverse). Readings beyond ±60 enter the critical zone, the range in which the model raises its alarm for a possible turn. Let’s take a closer look.
