Weekly S&P500 ChartStorm - 19 July 2026
This week: technical check, semis selloff, Korean crash, margin debt murmurs, credit spreads, gold miners, value vs growth, agri stocks, China tech stocks...
Welcome to the latest Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm!
Learnings and conclusions from this week’s charts:
The cap-weighted S&P500 is being held back by semis.
The equal-weighted is looking good, and breadth is trending up.
The unwind in Semis and Korean equities looks bubble-bursty.
Margin debt growth and seasonality are waving risk flags.
Relative value indicators are also presenting an omen.
Overall, it’s a bit of a conflicting picture at the moment. On the one hand “the market of stocks” is looking great; the equal-weighted index is trending up and breadth is improving. On the other hand, semiconductors look like they’re heading into freefall, and a number of other risk flags are waving. For now these two observations can exist alongside each other, but probably one will end up speaking loudest…
1. Tale of Two Indexes: the market cap-weighted S&P500 is a mess, it peaked early-June and has been stuck below overhead resistance ever since. The equal-weighted S&P500 however has been largely onwards and upwards —which echoes the solid uptrend in 200-day moving average breadth we’ve seen.
Source: MarketCharts.com
2. Semis Selloff: the key weak spot for the market cap weighted index is semiconductors. After rising to become close to a 5th of total market cap, and staging a 4x+ rally during the AI boom/bubble, and basically being the main driver of the market… semis have come under considerable selling pressure in recent weeks.
Source: MarketCharts.com
3. Bubble Watch — Semiconductor Stocks: the problem is things had started to become very much bubble-adjacent. So when you see the type of price action in the chart above, and how speculative things had become, it does make you think the risk of deeper downside is a real possibility. As I‘ve said before, bubbles are dangerous for bulls and bears: bears can get left behind as the market runs further and faster than expected, but likewise bulls can overstay their welcome and be left scratching their heads as the market turns faster and furious than expected.
Source: Topdown Charts
4. Korean Crash: especially when you see the Korean stock bubble starting to unwind (half of the Korean stockmarket is comprised of a couple of large chip stocks). As I’ve said before, there is of course some truth in the bull story for AI/chips — these things always start with good reason (but they end when things become unreasonable). This is Boom and Bust 101.
