Negative Outside Reversal Days Are Piling Up for the S&P500 - What Does that Mean for Stocks?

Last week we noted here a recent clustering of negative outside reversal days for the S&P500 (days in which both the intraday high is higher than the previous day's intraday high and the close is lower than the previous day's intraday low) and explored what that has historically meant for stocks going forward. We concluded that negative outside reversal days do seem to cluster around intermediate and major highs in stocks, but that the clustering by no means guaranteed a decline and any decline amount was fairly ambiguous. Nonetheless, we want to revisit the issue because on Friday we got another negative outside reversal day and that pushed the total number of negative outside reversal days to five in the last 65 days. This is a high reading that has only been seen ten times in the last twenty years. Four out of ten of those readings coincided pretty well with bull market peaks in stocks while the other six preceded only minor consolidations. Importantly, the only times we've seen a clustering of five or more negative outside reversal days and also been at least five years into a bull market advance was in 2000 and 2008. Again, we are not putting a whole lot of weight on this indicator, but simply noting past patterns. If indeed negative outside reversal days are indicative of stock distribution by "smart money" investors (because they have become sellers on price spikes) it is something of a worry.