U.S. Elections May Trigger Major Market Bottom – PART II

 | Oct 30, 2018 03:20PM ET

The clock is ticking on our expected bottom formation and now is the time for skilled traders to begin to position their trades for the remainder of 2018 and early 2019. We detailed why we believe the U.S. equities markets have already, or are currently, hammering out a price bottom after the last few weeks of downside price activity. In part one of this article, we illustrated how the U.S. election cycles are really more of a global geopolitical event and often drive price rotation in the months prior to these elections. Please take a minute to read Part 1 of this two-part research post if you have not already done so.

In this second part of our U.S. election research, we are going to continue to review topics that were previously discussed as well as highlight how certain market segments appear to be setting up for a massive price reversal. So, let’s get started.

Keeping in mind the information we presented in Part 1, our hypothesis is that U.S. election cycles present a huge opportunity for skilled traders by creating volatility and rotation in price and many segments of the global markets. Over the past 3+ years, we have been writing about what we call a “capital shift” that has been taking place. Near the end of the Obama presidency (2015 and 2016), a number of factors were taking place in the U.S. and global economy. First, the start of the new presidential election cycle was already working through the news cycles – the selection of the candidates. Second, China had recently instilled capital controls to prevent a capital outflow issue and to support its bulging economy locally. Lastly, emerging markets and oil had collapsed, putting incredible pressures on certain foreign markets to support their local economies and find suitable sources for their investments as currencies started to collapse as well.

This event, which actually started in 2014 or so, initiated what we call the “capital shift” where cash quickly moved out of risky investments and hunted for and deployed within safer investment structures – the U.S. and major global equity markets. In particular, we believe the U.S. technology, healthcare and biotech sectors were huge beneficiaries of these new capital investments and we think that as these share prices started increasing, more and more capital kept flowing into those sectors – like a dog chasing his tail. The price advances seem to never end… until the 2016 election cycle event. This caused the entire global equities markets to pause for a few months as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battled it out.

In the weekly XLF chart below, you can see how quickly after the US presidential election the financial sector sprung back to life – rallying nearly 20% within the 6 weeks following the Trump victory. This is a massive move for investors and traders. Skilled traders know to watch for these setups within election-cycle events and that's why we wrote this article – to let traders know that massive trading opportunities exist over the next 3~6+ weeks.

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You can also see from this chart that by the time President Trump was sworn into office, the XLF price rotated within a 12~15% range before the new Trump policies and objectives began emerge (near October 2017). At that time, the financial sector skyrocketed again by another 35~40% – reaching a peak near $30.60 in January 2018. Pay attention to what we are saying: we are about 7~10 days away from a US mid-term election that will likely present opportunities like this again and we want you to understand the huge potential for very big price swings that are setting up right now. The XLF is trading near $25.25 and any upside potential to near recent highs would reflect a 12~15% price increase (or more). Should this mid-term election result in increased fear in the markets and a related price downturn, the nearest support highlighted by the WHITE line on this chart would reflect a -9% price decrease. Either way, up or down, the potential for the financial sector to generate big gain is already there – waiting for us to execute.