Friday, April 13, 2007

Dollar Volume Flows Into The Dow Industrial Stocks

I thought I'd update my research with Dollar Volume Flows. Here is the Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA) plotted against the relative flows for the 30 individual Dow stocks. Recall that the relative flows track how many dollars have come into the Dow stocks over the past ten sessions compared with the past 200 sessions. More on dollar volume flows can be found here.

What we see is that, for the Dow stocks as a whole, flows have been positive, but below the levels seen during the stock runup from July to February. My concerns for this market are twofold: 1) We appear to be tracing lower highs in money flows; and 2) Bounces in money flows are not pushing the Dow to new highs. I would call this a yellow light; not a flashing red alarm. It simply tells us that institutions are not putting money to work in the Dow stocks following the recent decline the way they had been previously.

Among the Dow stocks, we see outright negative flows over the past ten sessions in DIS and MSFT. Flows into XOM have been particularly strong on an absolute basis. On a relative basis, the last ten sessions have shown greatly improved flows into HD and INTC. I'll be keeping my eye on housing and semiconductors as a result to see if this represents bargain hunting among institutions. Another stock with significantly improved flow over the past ten sessions is WMT.

In short, we are seeing positive money flows into the Dow stocks, not outright net selling. The pace at which large traders and investors are putting their cash to work in these issues has slowed--something I'm keeping a close eye on.