Strength in technology stocks as U.S. equities enjoy a bounce off their October lows looks like a breakout that signals the potential for strength into year-end, a technical analyst said Thursday.
“After a 12% correction from the July highs, the bears thought tech was finally cracking but the sector has come roaring back with a 10% rally off the lows while clearing levels of key resistance,” said Kevin Dempter, analyst at Renaissance Macro Research, in a note.
The Technology Select SPDR ETF
XLK
is breaking out above the downtrend in what technicians call a bullish flag pattern while the relative price makes new highs, Dempter said (see chart below).
Renaissance Macro Research
The sector is now overbought and may be vulnerable to some “tactical weakness,” Dempter cautioned. But the “key observation,” he said is that tech “looks poised for further upside into year-end and does not at all resemble a top.”
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite
COMP
index eked out a gain Wednesday for its ninth straight rise, while the S&P 500
SPX
rose for an eighth straight day, the longest winning streaks for both indexes in two . The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA
snapped a seven-day winning streak Wednesday.
In One Chart: Rare stock-market event? Here’s how many times the S&P 500 has seen a 9-day winning streak in the last 95 years.
RenMac says investors should continue to focus long positions on large-cap tech shares, but look to branch out beyond the so-called Magnificient 7 group of ultralarge cap stocks that have dominated the 2023 stock-market rally.
Would-be bears have shied away from shorting the Magnificient 7, data shows. Data from a team of quantitative-equity strategists at Bank of America showed that short interest in the group, which includes seven of the eight most valuable publicly traded U.S. companies, has fallen to an record low at around 1% of the group’s aggregate market capitalization.
See: Nobody on Wall Street wants to bet against the ‘Magnificent Seven’
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