 breath is look at simply how many stocks are making new highs and how many stocks are making new lows. So here we're looking at the time period from 2018 through 2020. We saw two pretty volatile time period times during that two major corrections during those basically three-year period where we had the market drop roughly 20% It was a little less than that on a closing basis in the US markets in 2018 But notice how we saw the peak in new 52 week highs was back in January February of that year of 2018 And then we saw significantly less new highs made you can see clearly by that pretty pretty black arrow going down We saw a lot less new highs towards the third and fourth quarter of 2018 And that tells us that there wasn't a lot of bullish participation by individual stocks Then we can look at the kind of the opposite of that and we start seeing less stocks making new 52 week lows And we looked to the far right side of this chart with a very bottom panel We had the percent of the SMP that's making a new 52 week low And in fact, we saw that peak the the largest number of 52 week lows Curve before the market bottomed by the time the SMP actually hit its low We were seeing less stocks making 52 week lows Telling us that stocks had begun to recover ahead of the actual index when the index is making lower lows We saw still a significant level But we went from about almost 70% of stocks at 52 week lows to just a little over 40% You can see the price low on that with the arrow there on the far right side So we were seeing internally that strength that the market was starting to improve Again looking at the same chart, but now we're looking at different look back periods So again at the very top we have new 52 week lows Six month lows three month lows 20 20 day lows just looking at different periods of time To see is the market strengthening or weakening? So during that COVID crash period in 2020 while the market was going lower We were actually again across different look back periods seeing less stocks going down That's that's what market bulls That's what buyers want to see that we're seeing that stocks weren't showing the same level of weakness the same level of bearishness That the overall market the overall indices was showing telling us that potentially when we want to start looking at other data as well Of course, but potentially maybe we were getting near a bottom or at least a tradeable low in the market And as obviously looking back we know that's exactly what happened the market put in its its low in March and then began to rip higher and To the point where as you can see we had no stocks essentially making new lows after we bottomed in March All the stocks begin to show extreme strength and we didn't have just this slow improvement It was almost a complete reversal in market trend where stocks really began to to go higher Following that that market kind of crash period in February March of 2020 And we gave got early insight because we were looking at market breadth We're looking at the individual stock participation began to dwindle on the downside Again continuing to look at new highs looking at six-month highs So near when our focus beyond just 52 week highs in this this current downturn we have So back in the at the end of last year in the start of this year every time the market began to dip We can see that we are getting a little bit more a little bit more of six month lows You look at the bottom part of that chart every minor decline. We started seeing an expansion of selling We started seeing more stocks hitting six-month lows even though the market was marginally off its high That was telling us that the market internals were beginning to deteriorate We had less stocks rallying higher and we can actually what this is what I do with with my threshold Letter is try to quantify that data and say, okay What are similar periods in time to where when the SMP begins to weaken simply just crosses below its 20-day average? Just as starting to turn lower What are the internals look like so with the study that I ran and I publish this actually in real time back in Early at the start of this year when we first saw this happen Ended up being the market peak was when the market began to the turn lower again crossed below its 20-day average And we actually had more than 5% of the underlying stocks hitting six-month lows What's the market done in previous? Instances and what we can see here is we saw that happen actually before the COVID crash We saw that happen before the market turned lower in 2018 We saw it happen before the market turned lower in 2015 We saw it happen before the market peaked before the financial crisis And we also saw it roughly six months to a year actually before the market peaked during the dot-com the dot-com bubble By telling us that we're seeing a lot of deterioration a lot of stocks are starting to turn lower And again, we don't need a lot. This is just looking at 5% The fact that we already had 5% of the market at a six-month low when the market was just starting to show some Weakness tells us that there's already being this build-up of selling this build-up of weakness and the markets just now starting to recognize it And so this is what I was writing about in January and February that we're already seeing a lot of weakness in the market The indices just hadn't recognized it yet and then we eventually obviously then saw the markets collapse by 20 plus percent going on from there But this gave us an early look that just looking for 5% deterioration By using market breadth it can be an extremely useful tool