By Scott Martindale
President, Sabrient Systems LLC

Stocks continue to hold up well, encouraged by improving global fundamentals and a solid Q1 corporate earnings season. However, at the moment most of the major US market indices are struggling at key psychological levels of technical resistance that have held before, including Dow at 21,000, S&P 500 at 2,400, and Russell 2000 at 1,400. Only the Tech-heavy NASDAQ seems utterly undeterred by the 6,100 level, after having no problem blasting through the 6,000 level with ease last month and setting record highs almost daily. Perhaps the supreme strength in Tech will be able to lead the broader market through this tough resistance level. Every time it appears stocks are on the verge of a major correction, they catch a bid at an important technical support level. In other words, cautious optimism remains the MO of investors – despite weighty geopolitical risks and, here at home, furious political fighting at a level of viciousness I didn’t think possible in the U.S.

There is simply no denying the building momentum in broad global economic expansion, and any success in implementing domestic fiscal stimulus will just add even more fuel to this burgeoning fire. That’s not to say that we won’t see a nasty selloff at some point this year, but I think such an occurrence would have a news-driven (or Black Swan) trigger, and likely would ultimately serve as a broad-based buying opportunity.

In this periodic update, I give my view of the current market environment, offer a technical analysis of the S&P 500 chart, review Sabrient’s weekly fundamentals-based SectorCast rankings of the ten U.S. business sectors, and then offer up some actionable ETF trading ideas. Overall, our sector rankings still look bullish, while the sector rotation model has returned to a bullish bias even though stocks now struggle at strong psychological resistance levels.  Read more....