U.S. market indexes and U.S. market sectors near-term trend: up

After a stretch of five or more advancing sessions (depending on which ETF you look at), most ETFs in this group paused and pulled back a bit today. There were two ETFs that lost more than 0.75%, namely IYT (Transportation) and XLE (Energy), but otherwise this was a marginal session ahead of higher prices. Remain bullish on U.S. markets.

About half of our global market ETFs closed higher today while the other half closed lower. The headline was a move above our entry level on VEU (World minus US), allowing us to buy that ETF today. Otherwise, the only other notable move was EWZ (Brazil), giving back a small portion of yesterday’s large advance. Global markets remain bullish and are expected to continue higher from here. We hold three global market positions and expect to have more opportunities in this group shortly.

UNG (Natural Gas) traded lower again today, losing 2.7%. Take a look at its chart below, this is an important point for UNG. Elsewhere, GLD (Gold) is moving back toward its near-term high and is not too far from the level where we will buy it (at 119). Stay tuned.

In its bid to resume its overall uptrend, UUP (US Dollar) took a step back today. It lost about half a percentage point. If it is unable to continue its recent recovery effort, we would be convinced that UUP is NOT yet ready to resume its overall uptrend, and that would be a good reason to remove the setup we have in place to buy it. We’ll see what happens.