One of the recent developments that we’ve been noticing is the outperformance out of the Dow Jones Transportation Average over the past week or so. We’ve been hearing all year about the Dow Transports struggling compared to some of the other major stock market averages. At the beginning of the month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up over 2.5% while the Transports were negative Year-to-date. Where markets close at the end of the year is a number completely arbitrary, so discussing year-to-date returns is one of the more useless exercises performed by market participants and market watchers. But regardless, the headlines were mostly about the Transports underperforming. Not only has this flipped over the past week or so, but bigger picture all the Transports do is outperform. Since 2012, it’s not the DJ Industrials that are leading, it’s the DJ Transports.

Since the Fall of 2012, the Dow Jones Transportation Average has more than doubled the performance of its Industrial counterpart. Here is a comparison chart showing the Transports up over 80% during that time while the Industrials couldn’t return half that:

More importantly, in my opinion, the ratio between the two has been trending beautifully within a very well-defined uptrend channel. The year-to-date headlines don’t tell the whole story. It’s not sexy. But all we’ve seen this year is a tiny correction in the ratio towards the lower of the two parallel trendlines. A buying opportunity is what it looks like from here:

So don’t worry so much about arbitrary year-to-date numbers. They really mean absolutely nothing when it comes to supply and demand dynamics. I think this outperformance out of the Transports should continue. I don’t like to fight the primary trend, that’s Dow Theory. Charlie Dow knew what he was talking about 120 years ago. Who are we to dismiss him?

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