TSP Market Summary: Week of July 11, 2020

By Roy Weisert, PhD, CFP

Key Takeaways

  • NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500 hit new highs despite rising COVID cases, driven by mega tech stocks
  • S&P 500's Golden Cross technical signal suggests increased bullishness favoring C Fund exposure
  • Market approaching key resistance level that could trigger upside breakout from recent range

As mentioned last week, the “record week from two different perspectives” continues this week. First, new cases of COVID continued into this week with records being set on Wednesday through Friday. Then you have the NASDAQ 100 which also hit new highs on Wednesday through Friday. Looking at this in more detail, mega tech dominates the NASDAQ 100 with the “Top 5” market cap stocks being Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, and Facebook. It just so happens that these five are also the S&P 500’s “Top 5”. Digging deeper, these “Top 5” have a 42 and 21 percent weighting in the NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500 indices respectively. Now let’s look at the “Golden Cross”, which is an indicator of increasing bullishness. This cross occurs when the index’s 50 day Moving Average (MA) crosses above its 200 day MA. That said, 75 percent of the NASDAQ 100 holdings sit in this bullish area, while 40 percent of the S&P 500 holdings reside there. Finally, the S&P 500 closed Friday at 3185, close to the upper limits of that 230 point range bound channel that I’ve been talking about over the last month. However, what makes this week different is that the S&P 500 had its “Golden Cross” on Thursday. When you merge the above, the conditions are more favorable for breaking out to the upside above that channel’s 3232 resistance line. As such, for TSP TIPS we’ll follow this set of improving bullish conditions and take in increased allocation in the C “S&P 500” index fund. Since both the C and S fund’s performance rankings are higher than the F fund, these monies will come from that F fund even though it hit record highs on four of five days this week.

Recommended Allocation (Moderate Profile)

This is our historical recommendation from this date. For current recommendations, subscribe.

G FundF FundC FundS FundI Fund
0% 20% 55% 25% 0%