Strange day Monday: More new yearly lows than highs for first time since March 30 and lowest number of ATHs, 13, since 12 last March 31; That is when the February to March decline ended, see daily chart of SPY. See my blog for my attempt to explain this rare occurrence. Meanwhile, 6 of the 13 ATHs today were oil & gas related stocks, see the list on my blog.

Here are the six stocks that traded at an ATH (all-time high) on Monday. All of them, but CQP, closed 1.9X or more above their price a year ago, shown in last column.

As you know, I focus on buying stocks at or near their ATH. Usually there are only a small number each day that do so. For example, last week, Monday through Friday, the totals were: 43,41, 28, 28, 20. Thus, each day  <1% of the 6,500+ US stocks in TC200’s database traded at an ATH. I like to buy stocks trading at an ATH because they are exhibiting incredible relative strength, beating 99% of all other stocks. The last time that there were so few ATHs and there were more stocks reaching a 52 week low than high occurred late last March just before the markets bottomed and took off on a nice sustained tradable rise. But back then my moving averages had declined to multi-week lows. That is not the situation now. So, I am not ready to say that this low number of ATHs indicates a bottom but something else may be  happening. This daily chart of SPY shows no decline currently like we experienced in late March. So what does this all mean? I suggest that market makers and other traders can no longer push many stocks to ATHs. Maybe these statistics are saying the market is really overbought and near a major top?  I remain mainly in TBIL in my trading account and have a few very small positions of individual stocks. As a recent retiree, I am a chicken and have one foot out the door….