Helene Meisler On What's Going On With the Stock Market Now

I mean, in a way, I think you Actually it was not a bad couple of weeks to sort of to take off and tune. But there have been some interesting developments in the market. You know, I would say the first half of your vacation, we had this continuation of this very powerful rebound off the bottom of the stock market that caught a lot of people by surprise. And then the second half of your vacation, like over the last week or so, we given some of it back. Yeah.

When I left, stocks were still going up, and now I've come back and it seems like we've done a round trip to where they were when I left in early August. I think it was August eight, And it's kind of been a weird summer for stocks, hasn't it, Because I think we had the best start to a third quarter since like the early nineteen thirties, and we even saw a bunch of the meme stocks doing really,

really well. And then you know, I've come back, and it seems like it's just a blood bath across the board. I know, while you were gone, like a MC became a story again at bed Beth and became a story again, and Adam Newman got three fifty million from entries in Horrowitz and I was like, oh my god, Q three two, this is just like Q one one again or something again.

It's tricky too, because you know the macro situation, which we know is very elevated inflation and a FED determined to stamp it out right, and so you know, one of the oldest cliches in investing, it's like, don't fight the Fed, right, Like, you hear that a million times, You hear it all the time, that that is a cliche. Remember you made fun of me the other day for some cliche that wasn't actually cliche about the gritters anyway.

That actually is a cliche. So you have the FED doing a lot of work to like stamp out inflation, and if you're believing they don't fight the FED thing, it's like it's very bold to sort of be bullish

at a time when the feed isn't tightening. But yeah, well, I mean it feels like everything is sort of being driven by macro at the moment, but no one really knows what the macro picture is going to shake out as right, because either you have inflation continue, or you get a big recession because the FED is raising grates and trying to cut demand and bring prices down that way, or you know, I think the nightmare scenario for a lot of people is that you get both those things.

But it all seems quite like tail risky, if that makes sense. Well, you mentioned the nightmare scenario, and I think that really is a good lead in to our episode today because sent event has been extremely negative and so if you look at various surveys of professional fund managers individual investors, you know, Q two this summer maynage you an extremely pessimistic overall, which might some of the positioning.

The Bank of America has a fund managers survey they I think at the last survey sentiment was like just a little bit better than apocalyptic, was how they characterized it. Well, it was worse than the two tho financial crisis, I

know that for sure. And that was even as stocks were recovering, and that's why people were calling this, you know, the most hated rally of all time and things like this, and so that sort of like gets into our our conversation today, which is like what's going on with the stock market and how do you like think about how investors are positioned. What are the charts saying, what are the surveys saying, and yeah, like what is the overall positioning.

So it should be a good episode for sort of thinking about like what we've seen in the stock market really over the last several weeks and months. Yeah, I'm looking forward to Okay, I am so scited about our guests, Like this is like a guest that I've been wanting, literally wanting to speak to for literally years. We've never been able to quite make it happen with scheduling just because you know, it's it's hard. Finally we're going to have her on. I'm so excited we're going to be

speaking to Helene Meisler. She is a columnist for Real Money, but also a longtime veteran of markets, having traded at Cowen, having traded Goldman Sacks on the equity trading desk, doing

technical analysis, managing money for Cargill. One of my absolute favorite people to follow on Twitter for all things related to stock market, but also just generally just one of my favorite people and someone I've wanted to hear from for a long time and we'll get right into it, and someone who has a very distinct way of analyzing the market. So Helene Meisler, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Oh my gosh, what an introduction, Joe,

thank you. Um, I just want to say I'm going to tell you guys that I have been listening to your podcast forever and so when you asked me to be on the podcast, I felt like when you have a favorite TV show and have invited you on as a guest. So thank you, Thank you, Heley, And that's very nice. So that's that is extremely kind. There are many reasons I enjoy following your work and following your analysis and following your sort of assessment of the stock

market and individual stocks at a given time. But I think, like, there's something you do that nobody else I know, or at least that I follow. It does in looking at the market, you chart by hand, like we all like we look, we pull up a Bloomberg terminal chart and we like drag a line with a mouse click, et cetera. You you like keep it organic, you keep it real like you chart by You actually draw out charts on paper. Can you talk to us a little bit about what

that is? Like, what do you do? What that is? Well, let's start. I just put a pencil to the paper every day. It's not it's you know, and it's a high low closed chart. I and I do volume. When I got into the business, which was actually forty years ago this year, we didn't have computers on every desk. We didn't have PCs. You had a quote tron which gave you quotes. It didn't even give you news. News

just scrolled across like headlines. If you wanted to look at the charts on the market, you had to post them by hand. I mean pretty much what everyone did. And then slow and then you had some services that you could buy where you got paper charts like O'Neill, you know, of ib D fame, did these daily charts and you'd get them in a book once a week. And then there were some weekly charts you could get, but that was the only way to do it back then.

And then slowly they started to computerize charts on a on a screen and um, and then we had computers, and you know, then everybody could have a PC on their desk. And so I I will tell you the story that when I started working with my mentor in this in technical analysis, just in Nemis, he had this huge pile of charts, handed it to me, and the chart scales are semi logarithmic, so it takes a little while to get used to them. And he gave me one little piece of paper that showed me what the

scales were and told me to chart them. And he left the office and I was still at the office at eight o'clock at night, because you know, you can't start charting until the market settles, and that was like at four twenty anyway, So I I'm charting and I'm thinking this is ridiculous. You know, I'm twenty seven years old, twenty three, and I'm thinking, oh my god, he's so old, and he was probably fifty five, and I'm thinking, he is so old, there has to be a way to

computerize this. So the next morning, I tell him there has to be a way to computerize this, and he says to me, there is a certain feeling you get from putting the pencil to the paper, also from sharpening the pencils, imagined only three year old me. I I rolled, I did the whole deal, and I said, oh my god, I can't believe this. Can we cycle? Can we make this a three hour episode? Here like this anyway? Sorry?

Keep going. I cycle cycle about ten or twelve years later, thirteen maybe, and it's I'm still charting by hand, and um, my husband gets transferred overseas to Singapore, and so I pack up myself and I go. I quit my job. And I said, you know what I've got. I mean, we only had dial up internet, but I know that there are charts sites and I can get charts on I'm going to give this up. And all I was gonna do is I was going to sit at home in trade. I mean, you know, I had no job,

and um, one month. It took me one month before I felt like I didn't know what the market was doing every day, and so I went back and I actually posted on every single chart the month I missed and I've not given it up since. And and of course the whole time I'm doing it, I'm thinking, oh God, damn it. Justin was right. This is when Tracy should do. Have to hurt two weeks off, just like justar chart what the market has done and go back, look, pull up the clothes, and just just do it by hand

to really internalize what you missed. I was gonna say, you know why it's good to do that is to sort of take a set of data for a month or two and just literally chart one stock. Is because after you do let's say a week, you take a look and you say to yourself, what do I think this stock is going to do now? And then you can see immediately if you're right on that note, what

is technical analysis and what's the value of it? Because I know it has it has its critics, people who say, you know, you're just drawing lines on a chart, sometimes by hand, as you just described, and then it has a lot of fans as well, and you know, there's an broader argument that if the market is really about momentum and sentiment, then something like technical analysis can be very very useful. So how would you describe it? And

I guess what was the value proposition? You know, when you were doing t a technical analysis, uh in the seventies and eighties, like what was the elevator pitch at some of these banks. Okay, first of all, I'm not that old. I know I'm old. I wasn't around in the seventies. I started in eighty two. But um, let me just say that I think what's evolved over the years.

Back back when I first started, you didn't have what I called today chart readers, because so many people, you know, think of I've just told you how hard it was to get a chart, and so you didn't have access to charts everywhere. They just weren't available. You literally had to buy them, and so you really had to be into charts to do this. So you didn't have a bunch of people who even understood what a head and shoulders pattern was or had to draw a line or

anything like that. And so that that has changed drastically now with the fact that anybody can pull up a chart on a computer, and so the analysis that we did when I first got into the business was what I call analysis, not chart reading. How now, what's the difference the differences is for me, I start with the statistics and indicators on the market. I don't start with what the charts are doing, because good charts turn bad

and bad charts turn good. I mean, you just said, Tracy, you just said you left a vacation and the market was up near the highs. You come back and everything sort of plopped. I mean, so good charts can turn bad and bad charts can turn good. So I start with indicators, and that's what I analyze. How's the breath of the market doing, or what are the what are the sentiment indicators, what's the momentum? So if you start with breath just recently, we breath was hanging in there

really well up until about ten days ago. Basically not just whether the line is going up, but like how many stocks within the index are performing well at any given time, right you're looking for You don't want a narrow group of stocks taking the market up. You want a lot of participation. So what's the breadth of the market? And I use the advanced decline line as as a guide, but I also use I used the McClellan in summation index.

I don't want to get to wonky on you, but that's sort of like a third derivative of the advanced decline line, so it moves much slower. It doesn't it takes a lot more to turn it, so you when you get a turn, it tends not to be false. And I also use the number of stocks making new highs and the number of stocks making new loads. So if you go back to Tracy's comment back in late July, NASDAC had a smidge over a hundred stocks making new highs.

But by I don't know, about a week and a half ago, when when NASAC kept going up, what another five percent or something like that, you could hardly even get to eighty new highs. So you were already starting to see the waning. So you didn't even have to look at charts to see that fewer and fewer stocks were participating. So that to me is the analysis on the indicators, and and that should eventually show itself up

in the charts. And so now if you go back and you take a look at a lot of the charts from the last few weeks, you'll see so many of them peeked out by early August, and so the last couple of weeks were just sort of a lot of churning and going back and forth and not really

doing anything. So it sounds like to me that like just naively pulling up a chart, like if you pull up a nas deck, a NAZ deck shart or an SNP five hundred chart, you're not going to at least it sounds like, in your view, get too far by just starting with the chart, drawing some lines and say, oh, it looks like it's going up or it's running into resistance here, etcetera. What it sounds like is that the chart is sort of the capstone or the final step.

I'm looking at these sort of like deeper trends happening in the market related to sentiment and breadth, etcetera, and so you really have to you know, like the chart is like the sort of like the finishing touch of like deeper analysis that you really have to do to

understand the market. For me, yeah, I mean, if I'll give you the fundamental equivalent when Apple reports earnings and everybody is looking for five dollars and they come in at five oh three, Yeah, they beat right, But then if you start breaking it down, revenues were a little like they did it on share buy back, they did it on expenses, they didn't. You start breaking that down,

and maybe that five oh three wasn't so great. And all I'm looking at is the S and P is up thirty dollars today, and I'm looking at the market internals and going, ah, they don't look so great. So it's the same equivalent, so to Tracy, to go back to your elevator pitch, it's not much different than fundamental anal analysts who are looking at earnings and breaking it down.

They're looking at growth rates, they're looking at you know, they're looking at all the expense ratio, and they're they're looking at all the same things I'm looking at, only I'm looking at it from what the market actually is doing and therefore what individual stocks are doing to make up the index. That's a good way of describing it.

Further to this point, the indicators that you look at, do you have different favorite indicators at any one point in time depending on like the overall health of the market or maybe where the economy is, like, for instance, does breadth become more important to you depending on certain market backdrops or economic fundamentals and things like that. Good question. That is a good question, estan. Um No, So let me take you back a little bit to um Joe.

You mentioned that the meme stocks were coming back in vogue just recently, just like the first quarter of twenty one. Everybody dates the bear market to the peak in November for NASDAC and the peak in January for the SMP. I think the bear market actually started in the first quarter because if you go back, Okay, there you go, if you go back, that was when you had peak everything, peaks speculation. You had the most bulls and bear um, sorry,

the most bulls and fewers bears in the market. You had over seven hundred stocks making new highs on NASDAC. That's unheard of. Um. You had the biotechs were running, the meme stocks were running. You had oh, peaks backs, let's not forget about peaks, facts and all of that. And then you had what should be what was a normal correction into the spring of a big emotional high. But after that you started to get fewer and fewer stocks making new highs. On every subsequent rally. You started

to get much narrowing breath. You know, you started to get to the point where there were what ten Nasdack stocks that were influencing the entire market. Without them, we would have peaked well earlier than November in NASDAC. And if you go back and you look at all these charts, most of them never made new high skin, or if they did, they sort of got up there and failed. So to me that we are eighteen months into a bear market. Now that's what to me the internals can

tell you. And and so then if I come back and I and I say to you, everybody talks about the June low this year, but I'd like to point out that you had the peak number of stocks making new lows on NASDAC at JOSHIV eighteen hundred in January, and when you came down in May you had that exact same number, which your SEVO you had that exact same number. And then when you came down in June

you only had a thousand or maybe eleven hundred. So each time we came down, it was the inverse of what you kept getting in one, which was fewer and fewer stocks were participating. On the upside, what you were getting with fewer and fewer stocks were participating on the downside. You mentioned, you know, you go back to the beginning of one and you mentioned, you know, pique everything. How do you use in your analysis the surveys? And there

are various surveys. There's a a I I. I think it's like an individual investors survey and they just say like, are you bullish or bearish? And I guess people respond. And then there's like the Bank of America a monthly fund manager survey Tracy and I mentioned that in the intro, they say like, how are you feeling? Are your bullish? Are you bearish? What is your what do you what is your high conviction trade, what are your cash levels? Etcetera.

How do you think about the value of these surveys of just going out and asking people, do you like stocks? Share enough to me? The gold star in sentiment surveys is the investors Intelligence, which no one ever talks about anymore, but it's been around since the sixties and it is compiled of it's either a hundred or hundred and twenty I can't remember newsletter writers. So you have to have somebody is actually paying for your advice. That's number one

so it's not just Willie Nilly. I feel like Mark is going up, market is going down. Somebody is actually doing analysis and sending out a newsletter that somebody is paying for. And and so this outfit compiles each week how many of them are bullish, how many of them are bearished, But they also take into account how many of them are looking for a correction, and those are primarily bullish, but they're just looking for a short term pullback, and so you can really quantify it. It is very

slow moving. It doesn't jump around like the aii day traders do. And I don't know about the Bank America survey because obviously that's proprietary to them, but I I or investorous intelligence, like I said, has been around. It's got a very long history. I find that to be the gold star of surveys. And and if we want to take a look at that, back in June, there were bulls and nearly fifty or bears. That's bear market low kind of stuff. I mean, you just don't You

just don't see those kinds of numbers often. And now what we got as of last week was you've got bulls and bears, so they're not out of control. But they certainly have flipped. Um, I don't know what this week's numbers will be. I assume that when they come out tomorrow they'll they'll have come back. The bulls have come down and the bears have come up because last week was really Yeah, so I shouldn't mentioned We should

just mention that we're recording this on Tuesday, auguste. And so there's a lot happening this week with Jackson Hole and the potential for sentiment to maybe maybe change a little bit. Right, So now to go back to AII, because I have a pet peeve that if I could use this platform to scream from the hills for um, everybody who was who uses a AII, okay, they only seem to use it to give you their bullish case. They never once tell you when bulls. When bulls are over.

In the first quarter, you didn't hear anything about AII. But when bulls got down to and May, oh, everybody was talking sentiment. You know, first of all, it's it's really mostly a crap survey because how many people do you know that are members of a AI And if they are, they're old than me and I'm sixty one, I mean, you know, and and you don't have the same people surveyed every single week, and you know, so

it's sort of a crapshoot. I'll give you one of the survey that I think is is quite good, and that is the National Association of Active Investment Managers and an a ai M name, and they survey their members every single week and ask them what their exposure to the market is. They survey them on Wednesday morning, the results come out on Thursday morning, so they're very fresh, and I have found that to be an incredibly useful survey.

So tell us more about what you're seeing. I guess over the summer, so you know, you talked about sentiment getting like quite low in June. We've also seen explanations for some of the market moves, Lots of people saying that the rally was just driven by short covering and things like that. What did you see over that time period, like how much of it was genuine sentiment versus technical

shifts such as covering short positions. Well, Bob Prector, famous technical technician, once said, all rallies start with short covering, and that's true. The question is is whether or not after the short covering is finished, you get real buying.

I suppose that what you could say is that the number of stocks making new highs having peaked in late July early August probably tells you that the whatever buying you had petered out by then, and anything that was left over was just, you know, if you will, the dregs. So I think sentiment was incredibly bearish. But I think it was incredibly bearish in May, and I think we got very oversold in May. And if you go back

to that whole May June period, you were oversold. You had a little rally in late May, and then you came down again. But again, as I said, you had almost eighteen hundred stocks on NASDAC making new loads in May, but by the time you came down in June, you had a little over a thousands, So that's already a contraction to new loads, and sentiment was only getting worse. And then you have I talked earlier about the McClelland

summation index, which is a slow moving breath indicator. I'll just use it at that that was actually making a higher low and starting to turn up. So you were already starting to get people. There were people buying stocks in May I don't know who they were, but I know that people were or at least they were no longer selling them. And you know, you can see it now if you go back to the charts, go take a look at all those arc names. They weren't making

new loads. Biotech that stopped making new loads, a lot of the software stocks that stopped making new loads. And and so was that shorts covering I I can't say, but some by he had decided it was enough. And I think that's how you sort of got that June low was over a period. Now, I will go back to one other thing is that everybody was talking about, but we haven't seen capitulation that. Lets let's talk about

the cues for a minute. In one, you could probably count on one hand the number of times the Cues traded over a hundred million shares. This is the for the listeners, this is the q q Q. Yeah. And in two you could probably count on one hand up until May the number of times the Cues didn't trade over a hundred million shares. So everybody is looking for

that one day when the capitulation had taken place. Over months, you know, it was just a hundred million shairs every single day you were trading these incredible high numbers of cues. I mean go back, or or if you go back and you look at Apple, I mean, take a look at Apple, and all of a sudden, Apple was trading millions and millions and millions and millions more shares than it had ever traded. So there were people, there was plenty of selling. It just didn't happen, Oh my god,

in one day. Right. People have this fantasy there's gonna be like one day, like a black Monday or something at all washes out. But really, if you look over a period of time, you see very intense, sustained, widespread pessimism. I want to ask you, though, you know, one of the advantages that you must have at this point is just obviously your experience and having been watching markets, having been watching these indicators and volume indicators and surveys and

charts for decades. Now, can you talk about a are there any like periods that you think like, this feels familiar, this feels like another time, like you feel it and sort of like and be like, do you keep your all year old charts such that you could sort of go back and look at a comparable period to see like how similar some certain timeframe was. That's a great question. So I'm going to start by telling you I don't believe in analogs, but I do believe history repeats and

chart patterns repeat. Because if you didn't believe truck patterns repeat, why you're looking at charts? But you know all those analogs, why do they always end up in the nine crash? I've it's we're always one week away according to these overlaid charts of like this is exactly like the lead

of it's. To me, it's just amazing. And and yeah, I lived through the seven crash, okay, And I will tell you that the only people who tell you, oh, look how easy it was to buy are the people who were looking at charts and we didn't live through it,

because I got news for you. It was probably to me, it was one of the scariest periods in the market I've ever seen, you know, I mean, everyone gets crazy now, but the stock market was down in one day, um and and it had come on the heels of three incredibly bad days prior to that, and and then when you opened down again on Tuesday morning. Just so listeners know what happened that Tuesday morning, when we still had

a specialist system in place. Twenty eight of the thirty Dow stocks were halted for trading at I don't know, around eleven o'clock in the morning, and the specialists said, I'm not reopening till life on buyers. And that's how come we made the low that morning, because they literally closed the market without really closing the market, okay, which is what the circuit breakers today are sort of meant to do, right anyway, But to me that was pretty scary.

So again, anybody who tells you that, oh it was so easy, please, they didn't live through it all right, which is why I look at those nine crash charts and I'm like scared. Okay. So history repeats, patterns repeat, and so yes, I often will take a look at a chart and think, ah, I think I've seen this before, and most recently I took a look at UM two thousand to two thousand and one, and it's it's quite interesting to see how we came down and we rallied

and we came back. Anyway, if I did a Twitter thread on it, and what I found was fascinating was obviously no one could have ever predicted nine eleven, and let's hope we never have another one again. But that capitulatory low led to I can't remember if it was about a twelve or thirteent rally in the SNP over the next six or eight weeks, and you did not

turn around and die. We went into from November until March or April, we just went into a like a ten percent trading range, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. Now, yes, what came out on the other end in April was a complete plunge, but forget that. But you really, and and it seems to me nobody even entertains the fact that now we can just have a market that doesn't have to give

it all back, it doesn't have to keep going. You could really just digest what we just had with within the context of ups and downs, ups and downs, and I sort of think that's probably likely. So in other words, I don't care what jacksonhole happens if if you know, like if the market plunges, so it's part of the

up and down, up and down. Well, this was actually gonna be my next question, but can you talk a little bit about how you view the relationship between stocks and yields, So bond yields at the moment, like, is that something that you look at and can you apply the same sort of indicators and technical analysis to bond movements as you can to stocks, or at least try

to um draw the relationship between them. Well, when it comes to bonds, I just I literally just look at the charts because that's all I have personally, I don't have anything else. I do have a sentiment indicator that I like to use, but it only gets extreme if you're lucky once or why a year so um which, by the way, it got extreme in June at you know, which meant yields were probably at the high. There is a direct relationship between interest rates and the stock market.

As a matter of fact, I will tell you that in January, just as Trump was taking office, everybody was a little hysterical what was going to happen to the stock market? And I went back and I looked at how presidential scandals, if you will, or situations affect the stock market, and the answer was they don't. And I did an attire study on it, and I found out what effects the stock market. Interest rates are Obviously the biggie,

and the other is taxes, so financial. I mean, some people would say earnings, but I would say, well, low interest rates help earnings, and you know, lower taxes help earnings. So it's all related, but it's financial indicators are what matters to the stock market. So of course interest rates matter.

And if you go back and you take a look at the low in in June, I'm sorry that the low end bonds, the high end yields in June was absolutely when not just the stock market stop, but when all the growth stocks stopped going down and commodities had a little peak you know there. I don't understand who you cannot look at the charts and not see it, but to me, it's that obvious. And and right now I think that if you go back again to Tracy left and interest rates were near their lows, and now

they've crept up, and what's been gotten hit the hardest. Oh, look, growth stocks, Tracy go back on vacation again, I'd be happy to, all right, for the good of everyone's portfolio, I will take that on. Can we actually talk a little bit more about you know, we're talking about the meme stocks having this sort of like kind of like this weird echo of January February one lately with like AMC back in the news, bed bath and beyond back

of the news. It feels like, you know, my recollection after the dot com bubble burst and the start of I guess it's early two thousand, like the very peak, it took a while for people to really give up the story. And you did see these sort of echo

booms where the stuff the high Flyers from. They would have these occasional rally I think we were like four or five like rallies during that those two years that you're talking about, Like it took people a long time to sort of give it up and say, no, this is really that story is over. Go back and take a look at the chart. The S and P came back almost to the old high in September of two thousand.

I mean, so nobody was talking bear market. Um. I think I think there were plenty of were talking that

the dot com bust had happened again. If if you take a look at that, and then if I if my memory serves, I think it was in December, around sometime early December two thousand, one of the high flyers maybe in Cisco maybe pre announced a quarter or had some announcement, and it was sort of what I call a realization when everyone goes, oh my god, maybe things aren't so good, and and the and the market started falling, and and and I would I would also tell you

I think that Twitter and the and social media has has learned, has has really exacerbated everything we do in the market tenfold. We'll talk about that. That's interesting. Well, I mean when when I was a child, when I got when I got into the business, Um, I told you you had a quote tron. You you couldn't even pull up a news story on a quote tron. The

story came across the tape, as we called it. The story came across, and if you wanted to read the story, you got to get up from your desk, look over to the Dow Jones news machine, which was like a roll of paper that just you know, spit it out and you had to you know, sort of pull it off, caught it, tape it, xerox it, and then you have to go tape the story back at the machine in

case somebody else wanted to read it. Think about how much time that took just to read a story, whereas now you can just pull up any story you want, so that immediately just changes the whole timing in the market.

Things are just accelerated now. Now, picture that if you can pull up a story in the market, and everybody can pull up a story in the market at the exact same time, and then it gets magnified on Twitter or Facebook or whatever like that quickly, everything just happened so much faster and gets reacted to so much faster

than it used to be. You know, if you pull up a chart of bed, bath and Beyond, for instance, which is now a very interesting looking chart with a big decline and then a big spike and then another big decline in an even shorter time frame. So just over the past month, what do you see, like, what would you be looking at when you analyze that stock. Now you're going to have to give me two seconds to pull up the chart. Please do. I will tell you I don't look at those charts because to me,

they're useless. While you're pulling this, I'm looking at the q q Q chart from two thousand, just well, you know, going back so that it looks like the q q Q the NASA on t F peaked at about a hundred and twenty in the spring of two thou and dropped by May and then rallied another by September. And so to your point, like there it was this like a really big rebound that I sort of had forgotten about. In summer of two thousand were probably a lot of

people thought, oh, yeah, we're back. Who said that the dot com? But that was just a little hiccup, and then of course it went to plunge much more, and by early two thousand two is down to twenty five. But you know, there was this like pretty impressive echo boom uh in two anyway. Sorry, yeah, but you know, Joe, even if you go back and you think about two thousand and seven, two thousand, two thousand and nine, you know,

we peaked in October of two thousand and seven. How many people you think can tell you that we we peaked in October of two thousand and seven. How many people you think can say to you, oh, most people think we peaked in two thousand and eight, because you came down then yet a rally I um, I think into maybe early January and then and then we came down to the bear sterns low remember that, and everybody thought, Okay, we're done. That was the problem. It got fixed and

we rallied into May. Even the banks had a rally into May, and then you know, things weren't so good. Okay, Tracy, I'm looking at bed Bath and beyond, and all I see is a stock that has some serious resistance at thirty. Walk us through, walk us through how you make that assessment. Well, last September you had a high at thirty, you had a higher thirty, and early March had a high. It looks like maybe twenty nine in late March, and then this time you got to thirty. I don't know. It

seems like resistance to me. And and usually let me just explain to you. Maybe maybe some readers should readers listeners should shouldn't understand think of resistance. Um, let me think of how to explain this. Okay. I think of resistance as a big giant sandwich you're trying to eat. And it's the old joke, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Okay, So just because you got to resistance isn't the end of the world, because you have to think of resistance as I own it.

Here somebody owns it there, and so somebody is saying, oh God, just let me get back to even. And I pro us I'll never trade that stock again. I mean, we've all had that experience and and so and so you're always gonna have somebody who says, thank God, I got you know, I was down thirty in the stock and now it's got back. I swear I'm never going to trade this stock again. And so you that's why resistance works, okay. And and so just because you back

off of resistance doesn't mean it's bearish it. You know, you do have to keep eating through it like a big sandwich. Now, sometimes it's bearish, but not always. And and so I often say basis are not built in a day. I know everybody wants the bottom to be built in a day, but it isn't. Just like the top isn't built in a day. And if it took nine months to build the top, you can generally expect it's going to take six or nine months to build a bottom because you have to sort of go from

weekends to strong hands. Let me ask you about another chart that probably is maybe more sort of crucial for the future of the market than bed Beth and beyond is entertaining as that story is. And then of course is Apple And what do you see when you pull up the Apple chart? You know, I can sort of eyeball A peaked actually January, then it almost came back to it ties in April that it had a lower high in August. It's come back like is this a is this having a hard time? Is it the same story?

It's a really tough resistance to break through, Like, what's the story here? It's a stock that got to resistance. That's that's what I see. So let me right now because my view on the market is not wildly bullish, Okay, right now, I'm I pretty much think you're going to

have a volatile period from now through September. UM. That's just the My indicators say that we're overbought, where intermediate term overbought, short term overbought, uh breath has started to roll over, so you sort of have to cycle through that whole overbrought to over sould period. So you know, if I was if I thought that the market was overbull oversold here, I would be more positive on Apple right now. But I look at the Apple chart and I say, Okay, Apple ran from one thirty to one

seventy five. You know, big deal. If it comes down to one fifty and it holds in the big scheme of things, it's no big deal, you know, if you're an Apple holder. And and I would look at so now I look at the chart, and really all I see is a lot of resistance at one eight. That's all I see. So I think it should correct? Could it correct all the way down to one fifty? Sure? All right, I have one more stock I want to

ask you about it. And it's also a very interesting chart, and it's one that you and I have a shared affinity for this chart, could you and I think it's already up on my scres on my screen to you? All right? So what what tell me what you see when you see the Shopify chart? It's a dot com bust. Okay, that's that's the only thing I see there. I see a stock that had a huge, massive peak and and and in that respect, I'm going to go to a

little bit of a longer term chart. But we just discussed earlier early and that stock, if you take a look, got up just over one forty had the big correction. Now take a look how it got to one sixty and then it just kind of died I and you know, then it corrected, it came up to a little over one sixty, and then died again. I I think if you think about a breakout, like you think about a kid running away from home. Okay, did the kid go to the garage of the neighbor next door and look

across the street to see if mom was worried? Or did the kid get on a bus and go to the next town. The kid who got on a bus and goes to the next town as a breakout, The kid who went next door to the neighbor didn't really want to run away. I just wanted to see what was happening. Um. And so a stock that keeps trying to break out and can't is the kid who went to the neighbor. And that, to me is what I see in shopify it. It kept trying to do it,

but it kept coming. Sometimes those kids, sometimes even the kids who come to go to the next town, I regret it want to come home. This is true. But you know, you can also measure a target there and then you don't want to know. It doesn't look pretty, looks like I want this to be. This is just go through all the This should be mad money. This is what mad money should be. A Helene Meisler just it's so good. It's so good. Oh stop anyway that, you know. So let me just give you about the

market right now. I don't know what happens in Jackson Hall. I mean it just to me, it seems like a big wild card right here in the near term. But I think we have a market that should see a lot more volatility. We have a market that has sentiment that is not terribly giddy. Um, it's it's certainly going to be barished pretty quickly. Uh. And if you just want to witness, every weekend, I do a poll on Twitter for the next hundred points in the S and P and this past weekend I had only or thirty

three percent. We're looking for the next hundred points to be on the upside. And I've been keeping that poll for over two years and that's the the least number looking for the upside we've had. So it, you know, it tells you something about how fast sentiment will turn bearish. To go back to Tracy's question about did we have short covering or did we have real buying. You know, I think the short covering for the most part ended sometime in late July, and it's not clear to me

that you had a ton of real buying in early August. Again, those new highs coming down, so I don't think people are position terribly heavily in the market, which means can you come down and make new loads. You can, but probably not before you get over sold and already too much bearishness. So that's I go back to that two thousand and one scenario where you could easily have a ten or twelve percent up and down, up and down, up and down. Helene Meisler, this was so fantastic. This

was this totally lived up to the hype. Very fun. Really appreciate you coming out. I think we should do this once a quarter. Actually it's in all seriousness where we check in with you on the on the ind this seas on some individual names, and get an update on the weekly Helene Meisler Twitter poll, which I think should supersede all those other poles if it's especially if you keep it going several years. So fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the Outlaws podcast. Thanks and

mail guys. Thanks Helene. That was great. That was really fun. I'm so glad we finally had Helena. Yeah, she definitely lived up to the hype, as you said. But it's great too. You know, I think technical analysis does get

its share of criticism. And I really like the way she described it as basically looking at the fundamentals of the market versus the fundamentals of a specific company, looking at things like sentiment and breadth and how people are generally feeling about the market at any one time and how it's actually behaving. That makes sense to me. Yeah, there's a lot if you if you think about it, I think as an attempt to sort of quantify and

visualize psychology. We know that psychology is really important in the market, and I mean that's that's not even controversial, but you know, markets overshooting undershoot the fun fundamentals all the time. You know, we're all we're all animals, etcetera.

Then I think it makes a lot of sense. And so combining the sort of visualization of the chart with things like the internals with various surveys with volume to sort of indicate, Okay, this is a lot of people are selling right now, it's not just that markets are down. A lot of people are selling. I think you can have some real signal from it. Yeah, and I guess on that basis we might have an interesting um a

few weeks coming up. Yeah, totally. And to her point, which is like, okay, we've there aren't many bowls right now, not a lot of people have entered the market. But on the other hand, like there's still a lot of barishness, and so it's hard to go down when everyone is still out of the market. Like you seem to me like useful, useful things for thinking about where the market's gonna go next. Yeah, for sure, we'll have to have Heny in on again at something absolutely all right, shall

we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe wi Isn't All. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Definitely follow our guest Helene Meisler on Twitter. She's at h Meisler. Follow our producer Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armann, and check out all of our podcasts Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening to