On Tuesday we mentioned that our measures of trend were negative. That condition has resolved itself so it looks like we won’t be making any portfolio changes tomorrow. This is a good example of avoiding a whip saw by waiting for Friday’s data to make decisions. Our portfolios are designed to be long term in nature and have infrequent allocation changes. Since we use weekly data for all of the signals they tend to track the intermediate term trends. The sensitivity in our measures of trend show how long in the tooth the current long term trend is. Even with new highs our trend measures are barely positive so it won’t take much weakness to raise more cash. I’ll do an update of all of our core market health measures tomorrow.

It’s still early in the week, but I wanted to give you a heads up that our measures of trend are currently negative. We require a weekly close below zero before changing any portfolio allocations so this is simply early warning that we might be raising some cash and adding a larger hedge come Friday…but I’ll wait till Friday to make any changes in order to avoid whip saws. Our market risk indicator has two of its four components signalling, but the two positive components are a long way from a warning. What is interesting about their current condition is that the least sensitive components are warning while the most sensitive are a long way from a signal. This means there is some instability in the underlying market and that we’d quickly get a market risk signal if prices drop substantially. Our core measure of risk fell out of over bought readings in early July, moved back up to kiss overbought in August, and is now falling again. This is

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