The major indexes continued to rally this week on the strength of the $850 billion stimulus contained in the agreement President Obama has reached with theRepublicans. While the Democrats threaten opposition and/or modifications to the deal, it seems that ultimately they will get on board. If not, or if the stimulus amount gets whittled back, then we can expect a sell-off.

Other factors helping move the markets higher were a lower than expected trade deficit, initial unemployment claims 4 week average fell to its lowest since Aug ’08 and University of Michigan consumer confidence rose the  best since June

The NASDAQ Composite chart shows the index at new post crash highs despite volume continuing to be below the 50 day average. We have added a relative strength line versus the S&P 500 which shows the extent to which the NASDAQ has outperformed the S&P 500 since September.

The low volume levels are suppressing the number of successful breakouts which were just half the thirteen week average this week. Average gains for breakouts were well above the weekly gains for the indexes, however.

Industry Rank Filter in CwH Backtest

A subscriber asked us to run a backtest on cup-with-handle breakouts that were ranked between 1 and 137 on our industry rankings.

While this is easy for us to do, we thought it better to give our subscribers the power to do this themselves.

We have now added a new filter to the backtest which allows you to limit the backtest to stocks that belong to industries that fell within the top x % of the industry rankings on the day of breakout.

For example, there are 215 industries that on any day are ranked from 1 (highest) to 215 (lowest). Selecting the top 25% of industries will limit the backtest to stocks ranked from 1 to 53. Selecting the top 60% will limit the backtest to stocks ranked from 1 to 129.

Preliminary Industry Filter Results are Promising

We completed adding the industry filter to the backtest on Friday afternoon and were eager to to try it out. 

The results of using the industry filter in our CwH backtest surprised us. Previously, we have never found a relationship between industry rank and performance after breakout using standard statistical techniques. However, our backtest tool does allow us  examine a potential relationship more precisely and this time we found that breakouts in higher ranked industries at the time of breakout did perform better.

Our first trial run was made using our default CwH Backtest (no MTC criteria) with a filter on the top 25% industries. We found it improved the 1 year return from 26% to 87%. The results are shown in these charts.