The U.S. stock indexes were down nearly -2% today.

Prior to today, it appeared more likely the stock market would attempt to trend higher. The only positive about today’s price action was the volume was lighter. The S&P 500 stock index is now 2% above its October low and 5.4% above its February low.

To reverse the downtrend, selling pressure must be exhausted as buying demand becomes dominant. If we don’t see selling exhausted and buying interest in the coming days, it appears we may see the October lows revisited in the large-cap stock index. It’s only 2% away.

Looking at the bigger picture, a 2-year chart of the S&P 500 stock index shows its primary trend is still up with higher highs and higher lows, despite the volatile trading range in 2018. Nevertheless, the +/- 10% swings we’ve observed this year is a much higher range than we saw last year.

The stock market is seasonally in its best period of the year. That is especially true for November and December. Although, that hasn’t been the case yet with the S&P 500 down over -4% so far in November. For example, the seasonality chart shows the SPX has closed higher than it opened 70% of the time in November and 74% of the time in December. We’ll see if this matches the favorable odds or if it’s one of the 30% of times it doesn’t close positive.

The technology sector was the weakest today and it broke just below its October low. If its price has trended down low enough to attracting buying demand it could form a double bottom reversal and trend back up. If it continues to trend down enough, it could change its primary trend from up to down. Up until now, the tech sector has been the momentum leader. Technology is also the largest weight in the S&P 500 at 20%.

It could turn out to be positive that the former leading tech sector has lead the downtrend. Reversing leadership doesn’t normally sound like a good thing, except it is one of the main sectors weighing down the overall stock market the past week. Since it’s reached its October low already, we’ll see in the days and weeks ahead if it’s reached a low enough point to attract enough buying to overwhelm the selling.

In fact, momentum stocks have become the laggards recently. The S&P 500® Momentum Index is designed to measure the performance of securities in the S&P 500 universe that exhibit persistence in their relative performance. The momentum index is an index of stocks whose price trend momentum has outperformed other stocks. Indexes can’t be invested in directly, but we can use them to observe their trends. Here we see an index of stocks that were considered the leading momentum stocks have declined nearly -14% off its high, even more than the S&P 500 large-cap stock index. The technology sector overwhelms this momentum index with a 35.4% weighting. Tech had been so strong its weight is more than double the second largest weighted sector (Consumer Discretionary 15.4%).

You can probably see why I prefer to increase and decrease my exposure to the possibility of loss rather than just buying and holding an allocation with no predetermined exit. Because we know there is a point we’ll exit losers rather than let the losses become larger,  we won’t wait for losses to get too large and become the panic sellers. We observe many investors believe in buy and hold and passive asset allocation until they realize their losses get much larger than they expected and they respond more emotionally than they thought they would. I call it panic selling when they tap out because of fear rather than a predetermined exit point based on drawdown control.

The U.S. stock market remains in the range of an inflection point and we’ll soon see if it’s going to turn down into more of a downtrend or reverse back up. We’ll see how it all unfolds from here.

Mike Shell is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Shell Capital Management, LLC, and the portfolio manager of ASYMMETRY® Global Tactical.

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