TSX TrendWatch Weekly

I almost decided not to bother with an update on last week’s market activity… because there essentially wasn’t any.. and now and it’s Thursday already.

However, it’s probably good to maintain some continuity, so I’m putting out a short one.

This is also a great time to remind you that even though my commentary may not always come out on the weekend, the data updates are almost always published at the web site on Saturday or Sunday. That’s also when our premium service database updates go out to subscribers.

That way you can scan the listings and do your own homework on the indexes and individual stocks that have attractive trend and consistency values, and be ready to start trading on Monday.  The latest update of the DATA & CHARTS workbook was last Saturday. I’ll try to put out Twitter alerts shortly after those updates take place in the future. You can follow us using the http://Twitter.com page, your desktop Twitter software, or review the entries as them come out in the Twitter “badge” at the http://TSX.ProfiTrend.com site where this newsletter also appears.

WEEKLY REVIEW…  As I mentioned, the week ending August 21 was remarkable uninteresting. The S&P/TSX Composite Index barly budged over the week with a -0.2% change. The major American indexes did somewhat better with gains in the +2% range.

The good news is that all sector indexes still have positive trend values. HEALTH CARE, INDUSTRIALS, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, FINANCIAL SERVICES and UTILITIES indexes are all climbing at close to or greater than +1% per week by the moving averages we calculate.

There is even better news when looking at year-to-date gains in many of these indexes, but we’ll save that discussion for next week’s update.

We’ve still got 77% of the stocks in the S&P/TSX Composite Index in positive trend territory. We’re still working with this new version of the chart, which also includes the average trend values using the left scale and the thin black line. The current average value right now is +0.8% per week… somewhat higher than the +0.6% for the S&P/TSX Composite Index itself.

We’ll leave it at that for now and will bring you a wrap-up of year-to-date data next time… now that we’re 2/3’s of the way through the year. You may be surprised at the size of the gains in many indexes and individual share prices.  It’ll make those still on the sidelines drool!