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We've been posting to our "diary" page on a near-daily basis for quite a while now. Over the course of time, we've developed our own way of speaking about the market, and it might be a tad confusing for the uninitiated. We're not trying to sound sophisticated!

Much of the diary page is devoted to interpreting the data that is available in our daily summary tables. Some scientifically-minded readers might prefer to read only the tables, and skip over our commentaries.

We often speak of "separation between groups". Maybe we should just say "SBG", since we use this expression quite frequently. What we're talking about here is simply the % difference between the best and worst performing groups in our daily summary tables. If the best group that we identify is semiconductors, which gained 2%, and the worst group we identified was oils, which lost 1%, we say that the separation between groups is 3%. To be more specific, we're looking at our "25-slice" tables, not the "10-slice" (decile) tables. You can click here for more information about how we present data in our tables.

A high SBG would indicate that various groups are prospering and suffering, and that trading opportunities are available via trend-following. A low SBG would mean that stocks are moving in tandem.

Sometimes we make comments like "yearlong losers reversed today". That's a bit vague...are we talking about all stocks with negative performances over the last year? Those that have lost .001% or more in the last year? Those that have lost 10% or more? Well, if you refer to those daily summary tables you can see exactly what we're talking about (e.g. you might see that we're talking about stocks with yearlong losses between 19.78% and 44.01%...very specific). So, again, it makes sense to read our "market diary" page in conjunction with the daily summary page....the latter page gives you raw numbers, while the former is our purposely vague attempt to give some sort of "gestalt" on the market.

We might say something like, "stock with recent losses reversed today". Here, "recent" means "in the last five days".

Finally, you'll note that we sometimes refer to a stock as a "free agent". Here, we're talking about stocks whose movements are not strongly correlated with the movements of other stocks. You can read more about the subject here.