Chartcraft/Investors' Intelligence uses insider data from Argus/Vickers and Value Line as a forward indicator. They say that this data influenced them to exit the market in August '87 and miss the Crash. They are now saying that their look ahead indicates a double-bottom low coming up with an initial deep bottom in ~July followed by a retest in October which will be a decent buying opportunity for a tradable rally until about Christmas. In late December, the outlook begins to look neutral, followed by a bad market from after New Year into next spring, with possibly very bad market conditions next May continuing bearish into June 2003, viz. as far forward as their data will allow them to extrapolate.
After several years in a row (18) with yearly lows higher than the previous year's, they remind us, it's reasonable to expect some regressing to mean, and they expect 2002 and 2003 lows to be successively lower than 2001's lows. In short, they are bearish, despite the lack of focus provided by projecting insider data forward, which is further defocussed by the Value Line data on hand reflecting older data than the Vickers/Argus Research data.
Growth Fund Guide used to publish work on the decennial cycle and its composite curve reflecting superimposed daily or weekly closing-price graphs going back to 1890. According to their work, which Chartcraft does independently in their shop, the decennial curve is punk into the fourth year. Chartcraft/I.I. reminds us that, closing out a superbull run like we've had, we are likely to see a period now more like the early 70's than the early 80's or 90's, and urge caution in the next couple of years for investors exercising a buy discipline. Remember the spike blowoff of 1974 -- which, looking at it optimistically, was a fabulous buying opportunity but required ready liquidity to make anything of. Investors who were still long with equities bought toward the end of the previous bull leg (I recall a high-school football coach sitting with me in his car on my college campus in the summer of 1969 trying to sell me shares in the Keystone S-4 stock mutual fund; that was my Joseph Kennedy/shoeshine moment, in retrospect) were underwater and unable to profit from the 1974 blowoff, and didn't get any real relief until the 1981 rally which, perversely, was not centered in the old Nifty Fifty stocks a lot of people still owned, the "one-decision" stocks of the previous bull cycle.
Recent downside projections based on other point-and-figure chart work give them a fuzzy July bottom in the ~8950-9350 range as a "downside price objective". Their best market-timing results in the past, per Hulbert Financial Digest, has been achieved in their mutual-fund portfolios, on a timing-only basis. I interpreted these results in the past to indicate that one shouldn't look to Chartcraft/I.I. for fund or equity selection, but only for overall market timing signals based on their fund exposure. Right now they are 20% invested in their two (Fidelity Group and Rydex Group) mutual-fund portfolios.
They also have gold and bond mutual-fund portfolios. The gold portfolios are duplicated as are the equity portfolios, one for Rydex and one for Fidelity. They just closed out their Fidelity gold portfolio with a big gain, notwithstanding that other chartwork is still bullish for physical gold and crude oil.
T. Rowe Price's New Era Fund, which is a natural-resources fund (oil, mining stocks, etc.) recently gave a technical sell signal. These groups, Growth Fund Guide indicated years ago, tend to trail and outperform the wider equity market at the end of bull markets since these natural-resource stocks look to continuing economic activity, which tends to persist unabated for 6-9 months after the Dow Theory stocks have begun to discount future economic activity in the wider market.