Weekly Update

March 10, 2018

Welcome to the Bollinger Bands Letter Weekly Update for Saturday March 10th, 2018.

Next week is a newsletter week, so the Bollinger Bands Letter will be posted Saturday March 17th. A major focus will be the M and W Bollinger Bands patterns that formed as the correction ended and the uptrend resumed.

There really isn't much advantage to small versus large-cap stocks at the moment, but growth continues to maintain a significant advantage over value. If you doubt that, or question whether we are still in an up trend, consider our FAANG Index, which is solidly out to new highs.

The Value Line Plan remains in the market. With the Value Line Geometric Average at 568.71 the Friday buy stop is 555.49. I continue to work on a VLP replacement, but have not been able to come up with a model that is as elegant and only requires checking a single number each week.

Our outlook remains positive, but cautious. If the technicals do start to deteriorate we'll field some defense, but right now the four advance decline lines in our Market Timing Chart Package are all leading price higher. There is one risk, many stocks are lagging. If that continues we'll have to start talking about fielding defense again. Lags of this type often happen in the wake of corrections. They are serious, but benign if healed quickly.

There is one switch for the ETF portfolios this week, sell EWJ and buy EZA, which is a move from Japan to South Africa.

The ETF Program portfolio holdings:

Style (21): IUSG, 1, IWF, 4, IWB, 8.

Country (21): EWO, 4, EZA, 2, EWM, 1.

Sector (27): XLK, 6, IXG, 10, XLY, 8.

Details on our Allocations, Ice Breaker positions and ETF portfolios along with our Market Timing Chart Package can be found here:

https://www.bollingerbands.com/bb-letter/

I have added an interest-rate chart to our market Timing Chart Package this week and fine-tuned some of the charts. I plan to add some international indices next week, maybe the FTSE, DAX, Nikkei and Shanghai to start. Suggestion always welcome: BBands@BollingerBands.com

Until next time, I wish you well.

John Bollinger, CFA, CMT