After trading to a high of $8.417 last week, prices closed the week at $8.299 for a gain of $1.283 (close to close). Clearly extraordinary gains over the last two weeks and left both the prompt August and September well above the commonly watched moving averages.
Despite this week’s strength, the consensus of technical indicators, failed to confirm the recovery with across the board in a positive (supportive) agreement. Due to the continued weakness in market internals- Open interest continued to decline as the market rallied. This week the total fell another +/- 20,000 contracts to the lowest level of participation since early 2016 – Average daily volume declined an estimated 20,000 contracts during the past week. Volume is currently less than the 50 – day average of contracts that has traded each day of the recovery from the 07/05 low with the exception of one. On 07/12 an “outside” day reversal to the downside was traded with the highest volume of any day during July. With the trading days remaining in calendar July, volume to date is estimated at 4,502,359 contracts while calendar June’s final total of 8,407,189– its is looking like July calendar trading has suffered very large volume losses compared to its predecessor.
