First Cross sell?

phcpbl

An interesting development is taking place in the SPY. The slow line on the 3/10 oscillator (known as the "stability of trend" line) has crossed into negative territory. Provided we don't have a really into the end of the day (anything can happen), today's close will give us a "First Cross" sell signal on the Daily time frame.

Leaving aside the First Cross strategy, let's just look back on the oscillator to when the slow line has crossed negative and what developed from there. Going back to April of '07 we had 7 occurrences where the slow line crossed zero to the downside (not including the current instance). These are marked with a vertical line on the chart below, and you can see what followed from each occurrence.

This doesn't guarantee anything of course, though it is a statement towards the weakening of our "trend" that has been in place since March. As you can see in June '07 we had the slow line cross negative and we did get some downside, but ended up coming back to test previous highs. It is worth noting how drastic the break-downs have been following a new negative stability of trend reading. This counter-trend rally has put in successively lower momentum highs, and lows (momentum precedes price), and more recently registered a new momentum low (lowest since March '09).
Not out of question is the slow line coming back into positive territory, however, we would need a fairly sizable rally to get us back to that position. The kind of rally that would take us at or above our most recent highs. Again, a possibility, but the path of least resistance isn't supporting that probability at the moment.

I've highlighted price action after the most recent negative slow line crossings. The most recent (January '09) resulted in a relatively sideways chop before falling lower.