McClellan Summation Index Looking Bullish

A lot has been written about weakness in market breadth in the past week or so. With storm clouds looming over advances and declines, new highs and new lows, volume, etc., one might conclude that the breadth story is uniformly negative. Part of that interpretation depends upon whether you look at the ‘bad news’ in market breadth as confirmation of the breakdown in the broad market indices or whether you consider market breadth extremes to be contrarian indicators – at least in the short-term.

I fall into the contrarian indicator camp, but tend to focus on the intermediate term when it comes to highs and lows. Short-termers may be partial to the McClellan Oscillator; I am more interested in the McClellan Summation Index.

When I last posted about the McClellan Summation Index, it was October 25^th and I was concerned about two technical aspects of the index that I interpreted as bearish. It certainly has been a bearish month since then, but now the index suggests that we are coming out of an extreme oversold condition that should provide a bullish foundation for at least the next few weeks…so I’m back on the bull side of the fence for now.