[pcabc]

I had a couple of ques. re your sector breadth bar chart:

Sorry for not getting back earlier, I've had othr stuff on for a few days.

- is this something you are putting together or does a service publish these weekly?

It is something I produce myself, for myself but sometimes post here in case it is of interest to others. I suggest taking it with a pinch of salt, or perhaps a whole lorry load as I cannot make any promises that it is error free. I have a database of stock data and I break it down into sectors etc and carry out various calculations on it to calculate the breadth. I thought sector charts would give a little more oversight than just the full market.

- I'm confused how to read it. For ex., industrials has  a green long score, but it also has a LT sell red long position. That seems in contradiction. Why do they conflict when they are both long views?

I see your point. Perhaps I've not used the best terminology. I think 'Long position' is perhaps an error that should be corrected. I think it is best to describe, in very general terms, what I am doing. I calculate breadth data, advance / decline line etc and use various calculations which I characterized by very short, short medium and long breadth scores based on the time periods used in their calculations. The Overall, and errantly labelled 'Long Position' is a sort of consensus score based on the very short, short medium and long term scores. This is all fairly ad-hoc. The overall scores are as follows:
* Green/buy - breadth scores positive / increasing in all time periods - consider buying.
* Grey/hold - indeterminate. Generally do nothing (of couse check stops)
* Yellow/ ST Hold/Sell - Breadth has generally worsened in the time periods but not necessarily terrible. Consider selling positions, tightening stops on shorter term positions.
* Red/LT Sell - consider selling or tightening stops on longer term positions.
* Black or Brown - these are special cases that were derived from looking at warning signs before recent events, the 1987 crash etc. This is quite tricky to engineer something that is reliable and does not give false posatives.

I can't say I've had massive success, I moved down this route end of last year after the markets had gone sideways for a while and I was starting to see results just as the crash came in. So I'd not take what I have done too seriously, but it might be interesting to compare with others. Of course, you should do your own breadth research to ensure you have your own view.

Really what the sector breadth means is whether this sector is a good one to look at, or whether it might be best to shy away from it right now.

- I'm also confused about healthcare. It got a very short & long run green breadth score. yet short & medium are red. Does that mean its a buy now & looks good long but riskier in a medium hold?

I think you are reading too much into this as it is a fairly ad-hoc scheme that I've created. For the very short term and short term indicators for example I was using the MACD of the advance decline line and the advancing declining volume, for example. The very short term score was based on the histogram of the MACD and the short term on the MACD being above the signal line. I'm assuming that you know what a MACD is, if not there are excellent resources elsewhere. I've tweaked things more recently, so it may be a little different to that now.

The way I have intended to use this is to buy only when all the time periods are positive as that hopefully means you have best chance of a stock that will move in a positive direction. Be warned though, I'm not sure how good I am at practicing what I preach.

- on the momentum table, for the tech spdr etf what does the 70 fifty MA mean vs a 44 one hundred fifty MA mean % wise?

These are probably dumb questions, but I'm very interested in measuring and trying to time sectors. So this interests me a lot. any help would be appreciate, thanks.

On the momentum table I'm calculating the slope of the 50 day and 150 day simple moving averages and then converting that figure into a per annum basis, e.g. what % increase if the slope were a year long straight line. I sort the data based on those annualized slopes.

There are not dumb questions. I think the best thing to do is to plot the sector charts side by side with their 50 and 150 day SMAs, that would give you a lot of information. Also, if you are in a position to plot there relative strengths to each other, or an index, that is useful.