Hindenburg Omen 2026
Hindenburg Omen Triggered 15 Times in 3 Months: Crash Warning or False Alarm?
The count is real. The crash calendar is not. Here is what the signal actually measures, why it has been firing through an AI-led bull tape, and how cluster math turned a breadth warning into a headline.
The “15 times in a few months” claim is real — and it is also being oversold as a crash siren. The Hindenburg Omen is a market-breadth warning, not a price pattern and not a dated forecast. This series explains what fired, who is counting, and what history actually paid.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only include offers that fit the surrounding section. Nothing here is investment advice.
The number that jumped from a research desk onto a Barchart graphic on August 19, 2026, was not a rumor. The Hindenburg Omen — a market-breadth warning with a disaster-movie name — has triggered 15 times in three months for the S&P 500, according to Bluekurtic Market Insights. That is the second-highest three-month concentration since at least 1970. The record is 16, set in September 2018. After that cluster, the S&P peaked within days and later fell about 19 to 20 percent into Christmas.
Crash accounts treated those two sentences as a schedule. They are not. The 15-count is a historically rare cluster of internal stress. It is also a counting convention, a split tape, and a signal whose raw hit rate sits near 20 percent. This series holds both facts at once.
Why this matters now
As of the August 21 close, the S&P 500 sat near 7,674 — above its 50-day average around 7,541 and its 200-day around 7,096, and only a few percent off the August 13 high near 7,799. Headline indexes still look like a bull market. Underneath, a large group of stocks has been making 52-week lows on the same days a smaller group of AI and mega-cap leaders makes 52-week highs. That is the condition the Omen was built to catch: the market looks fine from the outside while it is tearing itself apart underneath.
Jason Goepfert at SentimenTrader, whose data MarketWatch used on August 15, has a narrower claim than the viral posts. After any Hindenburg signal since 1970, the average three-month S&P return was minus 2 percent, versus plus 2.2 percent for a random window. After 11 or more Omens in three months — only seven such clusters since 1965 — the average three-month return was minus 3.5 percent, and the average one-year return was plus 2.6 percent, more than six points below the long-run average. That is weaker-than-average forward returns on a small sample. It is not a dated crash.
The closest analog bears cite is 2018. The closest analog bulls cite is 2013, when a cluster of 10 printed and the uptrend continued under QE3 — and the stretch after June 29, 2026, when an 11-plus cluster completed with the S&P at 7,440 and the index then rallied about 4.6 to 4.8 percent into mid-August.
If you follow this tape from a research desk, a locked-down connection is not optional. A secure VPN for market work is the unglamorous first layer.
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This is a long series. If you want the later parts without hunting for them, an email list is the boring, reliable way to do it — the same way research shops still distribute breadth notes.
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What the Hindenburg Omen actually is
Jim Miekka, a market technician, built the signal in the 1990s. He was trying to improve two older breadth tools: Gerald Appel’s Split Market Sell Signal, which fired when both new highs and new lows on the NYSE exceeded a raw issue count, and Norman Fosback’s High-Low Logic Index, which tracked how often the market produced both extremes at once.
The name is marketing. It refers to the Hindenburg airship disaster of May 6, 1937, because the image is useful: a giant silver object that looked intact until it was not. A healthy bull market should produce lots of new 52-week highs and almost no new 52-week lows. The Omen fires when both extremes are elevated at the same time, the index is still in an uptrend, and short-term breadth momentum has already turned negative.
Market breadth is simply participation — how many stocks are joining the move, not just whether the cap-weighted index is up. A 52-week high means a stock closed at its highest level in a year. A 52-week low is the opposite. When both print in size on the same day, leadership is splitting. A minority of names, often mega-cap technology and communication-services stocks in this cycle, can hold the S&P up while a large cohort is already in its own bear market.
There is no official formula. The version most technicians use is the one Miekka gave Greg Morris for Morris’s 2006 book on breadth indicators. Dave Keller, CMT, who has tracked this signal live through the 2025–2026 sequence, treats it as a tornado siren: it raises the odds of a storm. It does not schedule the tornado.
The four conditions, in plain English
All four must hit on the same day. Miss one and it is not an Omen, no matter how ugly the tape feels.
| Condition | What it asks | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Uptrend filter | NYSE Composite (or S&P 500 / SPY) above its 50-day average, or 50-day rate of change positive. Originally a rising 10-week average. | A warning issued after the market has already broken down is too late to be a warning. |
| 2. Split tape | New 52-week highs and new 52-week lows each exceed a threshold, usually 2.2% or 2.8% of issues traded. | Both extremes elevated at once is the “civil war” reading. Desks disagree on the cutoff, which is why counts differ. |
| 3. Highs not dominant | New highs no more than twice new lows. | If highs swamp lows, it is a strong bull day, not a split market. |
| 4. Negative McClellan Oscillator | Short-term advance/decline momentum below zero. | Breadth has already rolled over even if the index has not. |
The McClellan Oscillator is a smoothed measure of advancing versus declining issues. Think of it as the slope of participation. Below zero means the average stock is losing altitude even if a handful of giants are not. Tom McClellan, whose family publishes the oscillator the Omen uses, has said for years that a cluster is a “pay extra attention” sign — not a sell-everything alarm.
Keller’s May 2026 StockCharts breakdown is the cleanest current walkthrough of those four boxes, and of the related Titanic Syndrome (new lows overtaking new highs), which this series will use in Part 5.
Dave Keller, CMT, on StockCharts TV (May 27, 2026): the Omen, Titanic Syndrome, and why recent signals deserve attention without becoming a crash call.
Why “15 times” is a counting story
Miekka’s original rule is easy to miss in a screenshot. Once the Omen fires, the warning stays live for 30 trading days. Extra signals inside that window are ignored. The warning dies if the McClellan Oscillator turns positive.
Cluster-counters do the opposite. They count every extra fire. Bluekurtic, amplified by Barchart on August 19, is working in that second tradition: 15 distinct trigger days in a trailing three-month window for the S&P 500.
Fact, not a quibble. Both methods are internally consistent. They are not the same statistic. A technician following Miekka might say the signal confirmed, went quiet, then confirmed again. A cluster researcher might say it fired 15 times. Headlines prefer the larger integer.
The universe matters too. NYSE-only, Nasdaq-only, and all U.S. common stocks produce different calendars. A broad-universe tracker logged 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23, with a May–August cluster peaking at 12 in a 30-day window. Nasdaq was noisier still: a record 16 Omens in two months by mid-July, because mega-cap AI leadership is more extreme there. The August Monday that MarketWatch flagged passed the two-to-one highs test by one stock. In an indicator built from hard thresholds, one issue can flip a day from Omen to not.
That is why this series will keep labeling the source of every count. “15” is Bluekurtic’s S&P methodology. “18” is a broader stock universe. “16 in two months” is Nasdaq. Mixing them is how a research note becomes a prophecy.
A research toolkit, not a trade
Breadth work is chart-heavy. Annotated new-high/new-low panels, oscillator overlays, and exportable graphics are how you keep a cluster honest instead of vibes-based. If you build those panels yourself, a proper drawing suite still beats a screenshot folder.
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A first look at the 2026 split tape
2026 has not been one cluster. It has been a series. Five signals from October 29 to November 13, 2025, were shrugged off. A February 2026 cluster was more meaningful: stocks rolled into the late-March low, and first-quarter S&P total return was about minus 4.3 percent. The big one ran from May 11 through late June; an 11-plus cluster completed June 29. Late July and mid-August added enough additional fires to push the three-month count to 15 while the S&P was still near highs.
That last clause is the tell. The Omen is a dispersion detector. It does not require the index to be falling. It requires the index to still be in an uptrend while internals rot. As of August 21, about 72 percent of S&P members were still above their 200-day averages. The second quarter returned about plus 15 percent after a weak first quarter. One independent tracker had the Omen inactive at the August 21 close: three of four conditions met, new lows only 1.35 percent against a 2.2 percent hurdle, and zero triggers in the trailing 30 trading days. By Friday August 14 the NYSE McClellan Oscillator was about plus 39 — which, under Miekka’s formulation, deactivates the warning.
None of that makes the 15-count fake. It makes the crash headline premature. Investopedia’s July 2026 update still calls the post-2010 record “spotty” and “a false alarm more often than not.” StockCharts puts the raw accuracy near 20 percent, which is another way of saying roughly 80 percent of individual fires do not precede a significant decline. Clusters improve the signal. They do not turn it into a calendar.
Keller’s shorter explainer is the right second watch before Part 2 walks the August tape tick by tick.
Dave Keller: Jim Miekka’s three components, and why these conditions tend to cluster near major tops — without guaranteeing one.
If you are going to watch internals for months
A serious watchlist stack is a machine that stays on: a box that can hold multiple charting sessions, a host that does not vanish on a shared server, and a site that does not get defaced the week you publish a cluster note. That is plumbing, not a trade idea.
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Key takeaways from Part 1
- The 15-count is a real, historically rare three-month cluster — second only to September 2018’s 16, which preceded a ~19–20% decline.
- The Omen is a breadth warning: elevated 52-week highs and lows, an intact uptrend, and a negative McClellan Oscillator, on the same day.
- Miekka ignored extra fires inside 30 days. Cluster-counters count them. That choice is the headline.
- Goepfert’s cluster stats show weaker-than-average forward returns, not a scheduled crash. Sample size is small.
- 2026 is a split tape: indexes near highs, leadership concentrated, many stocks already making new lows.
- As of August 21 the warning window may already be closed under Miekka’s oscillator rule. The 15-count still stands as evidence of fragility.
- Use it the way Keller and McClellan do: raise attention, do not outsource the calendar.
Next: the day that barely counted
Part 2 opens on the August Monday MarketWatch flagged: 297 new NYSE highs, 149 new lows, highs just under twice lows by a single issue, McClellan Oscillator about minus 6.4, index still near records. That session is the Omen in miniature — and the right place to explain 2.2% versus 2.8%, NYSE versus Nasdaq versus the broad universe, and why two honest desks can disagree about whether a day “happened.”
From there the series moves into the 2025–2026 diary: the November shrug, the February cluster that preceded the March low, the May–June mega-cluster, and the July–August fires that pushed the three-month count to 15.
[Part 1 Complete. Say "Go" or "Proceed" to generate Part 2.]
Hindenburg Omen 2026 · Anatomy of a trigger
Anatomy of a Hindenburg Omen: 297 Highs, 149 Lows, and One Stock
The August Monday that MarketWatch flagged is the signal in miniature. Here is the arithmetic, the two percentage cutoffs, the three stock universes, and the oscillator that can turn the warning off.
Part 1 established that the 15-count is real and that cluster math is not the same as Jim Miekka’s original 30-day rule. Part 2 opens the hood. On one near-record session, 297 new NYSE highs and 149 new lows cleared every box — and the two-to-one highs test passed by a single stock.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice. Read Part 1 first if you landed here cold.
Crash posts treat the Hindenburg Omen as a weather alert that either is on or off. Technicians treat it as a four-part checklist that can fail on a rounding error. The August session around the 10th — the Monday MarketWatch walked through — is the right specimen because it was not a crash day. The index was still near records. Internals were not.
If you are going to sit with breadth data for a 30-session window, you will drink something. That is not a trade. It is how desks actually work.
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The Monday tape, unpacked
Reported figures for that session, attributed to the MarketWatch write-up of the NYSE tape:
Map those numbers onto Miekka’s four boxes.
Box 1 — uptrend filter. The NYSE Composite was well above its level of 50 sessions earlier. That is the rate-of-change version of the filter. Other desks ask only whether the index (NYSE Composite, S&P 500, or SPY) sits above its 50-day average. Either way, the point is the same: you only want the warning while the headline trend is still up. A signal after a breakdown is a post-mortem.
Box 2 — split tape. Both 297 highs and 149 lows cleared the 2.8 percent-of-issues hurdle used in that write-up. They were not barely over the line. They were a genuine two-sided extreme: a large cohort making new highs and a large cohort making new lows on the same day.
Box 3 — highs not dominant. The rule is new highs ≤ 2 × new lows. Two times 149 is 298. Highs printed 297. The test passed by one issue. Had a single additional name made a 52-week high, or a single name failed to make a 52-week low, the day would not have been an Omen on this formulation. That is not a quibble. It is how a threshold indicator works.
new highs = 297
297 ≤ 298 → condition 3 passes
ratio = 297 / 149 ≈ 1.99 (the cap is 2.00)
Box 4 — negative McClellan Oscillator. About minus 6.4. Not a collapse reading. Negative is enough. The oscillator does not have to be at a historic low. It has to be below zero, which means short-term advance/decline momentum has already rolled over even if the cap-weighted index has not.
All four boxes, on a day the averages still looked like a bull market. That is the entire design of the indicator. The crash, if it comes, is supposed to start as this internal civil war, not as a headline-index breakdown.
Dave Keller, CMT: the Omen confirmed as a warning, not a timer. Use this as the attitude check before the arithmetic below.
2.2 percent versus 2.8 percent
There is no official Hindenburg formula. The version most technicians cite is the one Miekka gave Greg Morris. Even inside that family, the split-tape cutoff moves.
The two numbers you will see are 2.2 percent and 2.8 percent of issues traded. Both ask the same question: are new highs and new lows each a meaningful share of the tape, not a handful of leftover names? The higher bar (2.8%) is stricter. The lower bar (2.2%) fires more often. In a year like 2026, that single choice can add or subtract several “triggers” from a three-month count.
Why two cutoffs exist at all: the NYSE’s issue count is not a constant. Preferred shares, closed-end funds, ADRs, and the long decline in listed common stocks all change the denominator. A raw issue threshold that made sense in the 1990s (Appel’s original split-market signal used a fixed count of 30 new highs and 30 new lows) does not travel cleanly. Percent-of-issues was the patch. Which percent is a house rule.
How to read a count. If a desk says “15 Omens,” ask three follow-ups: which universe (NYSE, Nasdaq, all U.S. common stocks), which percent cutoff, and whether extra fires inside 30 days were counted or ignored. Without those, you are comparing different instruments.
On the August Monday, both 297 and 149 cleared 2.8 percent. They would also have cleared 2.2 percent. That day is not a borderline split. It is a borderline ratio. The fragile piece was condition 3, not condition 2.
What the McClellan Oscillator actually is
The McClellan Oscillator is not a secret. Sherman and Marian McClellan published it decades ago; Tom McClellan still publishes it. It is a short-term breadth momentum gauge built from advancing and declining issues, usually on the NYSE.
McClellan Oscillator = (19-day EMA of net advances) − (39-day EMA of net advances)
When the 19-day exponential moving average of net advances sits below the 39-day, the oscillator is negative. In English: the recent tape is weaker than the slightly longer tape. More stocks are participating to the downside than the smoothed trend would imply. You can have a rising S&P and a negative oscillator at the same time. That combination is the “index up, internals rotting” setup the Omen was built to catch.
Minus 6.4 is a mild negative. It is not the kind of oversold washout that often marks a completed decline. It is the kind of reading you get when the average stock has already started to lose altitude while a minority of leaders have not. For the Omen, the sign matters more than the magnitude. Below zero qualifies. Above zero, under Miekka’s original rule, kills the warning even if the other three boxes are still lit.
That deactivation clause is why the August 21 snapshot and the August 10 snapshot can both be true. Around August 10 the oscillator was about minus 6.4 and the four boxes lined up. By Friday August 14 the NYSE McClellan Oscillator was about plus 39. A reading that far above zero is not a rounding error. It is a breadth thrust in the other direction. Under Miekka, the live warning dies there.
Michael Nauss, CMT, walks the construction without the crash soundtrack. It is the right second video for this part because it treats the Omen as a statistical object, not a prophecy.
Michael Nauss, CMT (StatsEdgeTrading): decoding the Omen as a breadth construct — useful before you trust any viral count.
Research files pile up in a 30-day window
Cluster-watching means exports, screenshots, and old CSV dumps of new highs and new lows. If those files leave a machine, they should leave cleanly. Safe-erase is dull. So is most of real research hygiene.
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NYSE, Nasdaq, and the broad universe
The original Omen is an NYSE idea. Miekka was looking at NYSE new highs, NYSE new lows, the NYSE Composite, and the NYSE McClellan Oscillator. Modern cluster-counters often run the same logic on the S&P 500, on Nasdaq, or on every U.S. common stock they can get. Those are related thermometers. They are not the same temperature.
| Universe | What it emphasizes | 2026 behavior (reported) |
|---|---|---|
| NYSE-only | Classic Miekka tape. Heavier, more funds and preferreds in the issue count. Less mega-cap tech weight than Nasdaq. | The August Monday specimen (297 / 149 / −6.4) lives here. |
| S&P 500 / Bluekurtic | Large-cap index membership. The viral “15 in three months” number. | Second-highest three-month concentration since at least 1970. Record remains 16 in September 2018. |
| Nasdaq | More speculative names, more extreme AI leadership. Easier to print simultaneous new highs and new lows. | Record 16 Omens in two months by mid-July 2026 — noisier than NYSE. |
| All U.S. common stocks | Broadest split-tape detector. Includes small names the S&P ignores. | 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23. May–August cluster peaked at 12 in a 30-day window. |
This table is why two honest accounts can disagree about whether the Omen is “still on” in late August. Bluekurtic’s S&P count was still adding fires into mid-August (the 11th three-month trigger on July 30, another around August 10–11, three-month total 15). A broad-universe tracker whose last fire was June 23 could, by August 21, report zero triggers in the trailing 30 trading days, with new lows only 1.35 percent against a 2.2 percent hurdle. Both statements can be true. They are not about the same list of stocks.
Nasdaq’s extra noise is not a bug in 2026. Mega-cap AI leadership is more extreme there. A handful of names can make new highs while a long tail of unprofitable or rate-sensitive Nasdaq issues makes new lows. That is a split tape by construction. It will print more Omens than the NYSE. Using Nasdaq’s 16-in-two-months record as if it were Miekka’s NYSE signal is how a research note becomes a prophecy.
The 30-day window versus the cluster counter
Part 1 introduced the fork. Here is the operational difference on this year’s calendar.
Miekka’s rule. First qualifying day starts a 30-trading-day warning. Extra qualifying days inside that window are ignored — they do not “stack.” If the McClellan Oscillator turns positive, the warning dies even if 30 days have not elapsed. After death, you need a fresh four-box day to start a new clock.
Cluster counting. Every qualifying day is an event. Bluekurtic’s 15 is a count of events in a trailing three-month lookback, not a count of distinct 30-day warnings. That is why a quiet summer of repeated split days can look like a siren farm.
Apply both to 2026, in outline (the day-by-day diary is Part 3):
- A May 11 start would, under Miekka, cover roughly through late June. Extra fires in that stretch are one warning, not ten.
- The 11-plus cluster that completed June 29 is a cluster-counter object. Miekka would have treated much of May–June as a single live warning, then asked whether the oscillator stayed negative.
- July 30 and August 10–11 are new events for Bluekurtic. For Miekka they are new only if the prior warning had already died — which, given a plus-39 oscillator by August 14, it likely had.
- By August 21, a 2.2 percent tracker with new lows at 1.35 percent cannot fire at all. Three of four boxes is not four.
Neither method is cheating. Cluster counting is a way to measure how persistent the split is. Miekka’s method is a way to avoid double-counting the same regime. Headlines prefer persistence because 15 is a bigger integer than 2. Goepfert’s research, cited in Part 1, is on the cluster side: 11 or more Omens in three months, only seven such stretches since 1965, average three-month S&P return minus 3.5 percent. That is the fair statistical use of the 15-count. It is not a license to ignore the oscillator turning positive.
Opinion, labeled. If you use only one rule, use Miekka’s deactivation. A warning that cannot turn off is not a warning; it is a worldview. If you use cluster counts, use them the way Goepfert does — as a deterioration score with a small sample — not as a dated crash.
A 30-day watch is also a life that continues off the screen. Commutes, errands, the unglamorous fact that you cannot stare at new lows for a month without leaving the house.
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Why one stock is the point
People who dislike the Omen stop at the one-stock margin and call the whole thing arbitrary. People who love it skip the one-stock margin and post the 15. Both are leaving the useful part on the table.
Threshold indicators are supposed to be arbitrary at the edge. That is the cost of a binary fire. The useful question is not “was 297 versus 298 cosmic?” The useful question is: how often is the tape this split while the index is still in an uptrend and the oscillator is already negative? Rarely, if you use a strict NYSE 2.8 percent rule. Less rarely, if you use Nasdaq and 2.2 percent and count every extra day. 2026 is the second kind of year.
The August Monday still tells you something even if you throw the binary fire out. Hundreds of NYSE names at 52-week highs and about 150 at 52-week lows is a leadership split. Minus 6.4 on the oscillator says the split is not being resolved to the upside in the short run. You do not need the word “Omen” to see that. The Omen is a naming convention for a four-box coincidence. The coincidence is the research object.
Staring at that split for weeks is a concentration task. Some desks treat the 30-day window like a physical training block. That is optional. The data are not.
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Two household risks that are not the S&P
A split tape is a market-structure story. It is not a reason to forget the rest of a household’s actual failure points — a furnace in August you will care about in January, or the slow leak of sitting at a screen through a cluster. Those are not crash hedges. They are the boring parallel.
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Key takeaways from Part 2
- The August Monday printed 297 NYSE new highs and 149 new lows, oscillator about −6.4, index still in an uptrend. All four boxes.
- The 2×-highs test passed 297 ≤ 298. One stock the other way and that formulation does not fire.
- 2.8% is stricter than 2.2%. House rules on the cutoff change how many “Omens” a year contains.
- The McClellan Oscillator is (19-day EMA − 39-day EMA) of NYSE net advances. Below zero qualifies; a jump to about +39 by August 14 deactivates Miekka’s warning.
- NYSE, S&P/Bluekurtic, Nasdaq, and all-U.S. common stocks are different thermometers. Nasdaq’s 16-in-two-months and the broad universe’s last fire on June 23 do not contradict Bluekurtic’s 15. They are not the same tape.
- Cluster counts measure persistence. Miekka’s 30-day rule plus oscillator kill-switch measures regime. Headlines use persistence.
Next: the 2025–2026 diary
Part 3 puts dates on the table. Five signals from October 29 to November 13, 2025, that the market shrugged off. The February 2026 cluster that preceded the March low and a first-quarter S&P total return of about minus 4.3 percent. The May 11–June 29 mega-cluster. Nasdaq’s 16 in two months. Bluekurtic’s July 30 print, the August add-ons, and the three-month count of 15 while the S&P still sat near 7,674.
The question Part 3 has to answer is not “did it fire?” Part 2 just showed that it did, on a day that barely qualified. The question is which of those clusters the market paid, and which it ignored.
[Part 2 Complete. Say "Go" or "Proceed" to generate Part 3.]
Hindenburg Omen 2026 · Cluster diary
The 2025–2026 Cluster Diary: Four Windows, One Viral Number
Fifteen is not one event. It is four stretches of split tape stacked into a three-month lookback. Here is what fired, what the S&P did next, and why Bluekurtic, Nasdaq, and a broad-universe tracker are not arguing about the same calendar.
Part 2 showed that a single day can qualify by one stock. Part 3 asks the only question a diary can answer: which clusters did the market pay, and which did it ignore? History’s hit rate belongs in Part 4. This page is dates, counts, and aftermaths.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice.
The viral graphic treats “15 times in three months” as a single storm. The tape did not. From late October 2025 through mid-August 2026 the Omen printed in four distinct windows. One was ignored. One preceded a real drawdown. One was enormous and then the index rallied. One is the add-on that turned a June cluster into an August headline.
A diary is a calendar. Calendars are also how the rest of life is organized while a three-month breadth watch is running.
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How to read this diary
Three counters appear below. They are not interchangeable. Part 2 explained why; this page will not re-litigate the formulas.
- Bluekurtic / S&P 500 — source of the viral 15. Cluster-counting, three-month lookback. Amplified by Barchart on August 19, 2026.
- Nasdaq — noisier because mega-cap AI leadership is more extreme. Record 16 Omens in two months by mid-July 2026.
- Broad U.S. common stocks — 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23, May–August cluster peaking at 12 in a 30-day window. This is the tracker that can say “inactive” in late August while Bluekurtic is still adding.
When a number appears, the desk is named. “The Omen fired” without a universe is how this story got sloppy.
| Window | What fired | What the market did | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 29 – Nov 13, 2025 | 5 signals | S&P dipped toward 6,500, then resumed the uptrend. | Ignored |
| Late Jan – early Feb 2026 | ~5 signals (8 on a 6-month lookback) | Rolled into the late-March low. Q1 S&P total return about −4.3%. | Paid |
| May 11 – June 23/29, 2026 | 7–12 fires depending on tape. Cluster of 11+ completed June 29. Nasdaq 16 in two months by mid-July. | S&P at 7,440 on June 29. By mid-August ~7,786, up about 4.6–4.8%. Q2 about +15%. | Not paid (yet) |
| Late July – mid-August 2026 | Bluekurtic: 11th in three months on July 30; another ~Aug 10–11. Three-month count reaches 15. | S&P still near highs (~7,674 on Aug 21; Aug 13 high ~7,799). | Open |
Window 1 — October 29 to November 13, 2025: the shrug
Five signals in roughly three weeks. That is already a cluster by any casual standard. The S&P dipped toward 6,500 and then resumed the uptrend. No crash. No 2018 analogue. A technician who treated those five prints as a sell-everything alarm was early, and then wrong, in that order.
Dave Keller was already walking the signal on October 17 — before the five-signal window even opened. The useful part of that episode is not the title. It is the posture: flashing is not the same as a scheduled break.
Dave Keller, CMT, October 17, 2025 — twelve days before the five-signal window. The question in the title is the right one. The market’s answer, that autumn, was no.
Keep November on the board. False positives are not a footnote. They are most of the Omen’s history, and this series will not pretend the 2025 shrug did not happen just because 2026 later got louder.
Window 2 — late January to early February 2026: the one that paid
About five signals in the winter window; eight if you stretch the lookback to six months. This cluster was more meaningful. Stocks rolled over into the late-March low. First-quarter S&P total return was about minus 4.3 percent.
That is not a crash. It is a down quarter that followed a split tape, which is exactly the boring outcome Goepfert’s averages describe: weaker-than-average forward returns, not a dated collapse. If you only remember one 2026 window as “the Omen working,” this is it.
Keller’s February 17, 2026 episode caught the tape in the act — S&P 6800 in focus, the Omen flashing again. That is contemporaneous reporting, not a retrospective crash documentary.
February 17, 2026: the winter cluster in real time. The late-March low was still ahead. Q1 finished about −4.3%.
A winter cluster is also a winter desk. Long sessions, bad light, the unglamorous fact that breadth work is a body in a chair.
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Window 3 — May 11 to June 29, 2026: the big one
This is the cluster that made the 15-count possible. Depending on the tape, 7 to 12 fires ran from May 11 through June 23 or 29. A cluster of 11 or more completed on June 29, with the S&P at 7,440.
Nasdaq was worse, or louder, depending on your taste: a record 16 Omens in two months by mid-July. That is not a rounding difference from the NYSE. It is the AI-leadership split in its purest listed form — a handful of names at highs, a long tail at lows, repeated until the counter looks like a fire alarm.
The broad-universe tracker of all U.S. common stocks logged 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23, with the May–August cluster peaking at 12 in a 30-day window. Notice the last-fire date. June 23 is not August 11. If you use this tracker, the mega-cluster is already old by the time Barchart’s August graphic lands.
Aftermath, as of mid-August. Historically, 11+ Omens in three months have been followed by an average three-month S&P return of about −3.5%. This cluster completed June 29. By mid-August the index was around 7,786, up about 4.6 to 4.8 percent. Second-quarter 2026 returned about +15 percent after the weak first quarter. So far, this cluster has not delivered the historical average decline. That is a fact about the path, not a proof that the path is finished.
June 29 sits two weeks after Father’s Day and a few sessions after a lot of households had already switched into summer mode. The Omen does not care. The people watching it still have a June.
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Window 4 — late July to mid-August 2026: how 11 became 15
Bluekurtic’s July 30 post marked the 11th trigger in three months. Their own note was more aggressive than Goepfert: after that 11th print, they said that since 1970 the S&P was lower two weeks later every single time, median loss 4 percent.
Small samples break. A follow-up on X noted that this particular instance then broke that streak — the S&P was up about 2.9 percent three weeks later. That sentence should be stapled to every screenshot of the July 30 post.
Another fire around August 10–11 — the Monday Part 2 unpacked — pushed the three-month S&P count to 15. Barchart amplified it on August 19. As of the August 21 close the S&P was still near highs, around 7,674, a few percent off the August 13 high near 7,799. About 72 percent of S&P members were still above their 200-day averages.
Barchart’s August 21 Market on Close is the contemporaneous tape at the moment the 15-count was already in the wild. Watch it as a date stamp, not as confirmation of a crash.
Barchart, August 21, 2026: the session after the 15-count had already been amplified. The S&P was still near 7,674.
Independence Day sits inside this summer stretch. The market’s calendar and the civic calendar only rhyme by accident. A cluster-counter does not pause for holidays. A human watching one still has a July.
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Bluekurtic, Barchart, and the broad tracker
By late August you could hold three true sentences at once:
- Bluekurtic / Barchart: 15 S&P Omens in three months, second-most since at least 1970, record 16 in September 2018.
- Nasdaq: a record 16 in two months by mid-July — a different, noisier instrument.
- Broad-universe tracker: 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23; as of August 21, new lows only 1.35% against a 2.2% hurdle and zero triggers in the trailing 30 trading days.
Barchart did not invent the 15. It amplified Bluekurtic. Thetrading.tools-style broad-universe counts (all U.S. common stocks, not NYSE-only) are the reason a careful reader can say “the Omen is inactive” on the same week a headline says “15 times.” Part 2’s kill-switch — McClellan Oscillator about +39 on August 14 — belongs with sentence 3, not as a refutation of sentence 1.
The fair diary summary is narrower than any of those sentences alone: 2026 produced repeated split-tape days in an uptrend. One winter cluster was followed by a down quarter. The summer mega-cluster was followed, so far, by a rally. The 15-count is the summer cluster plus the July–August add-ons, counted the cluster-counter’s way.
Late summer is also when people leave the desk. The 15-count printed while a lot of the country was in transit. That does not make the signal false. It does mean the viral week was not a trading-floor week for everyone reading it.
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A three-month watch is a physical job
Four windows, ten months of on-and-off attention, and a summer cluster that still is not resolved. If you are going to treat this as a process instead of a screenshot, the unglamorous constraint is the body doing the watching.
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Key takeaways from Part 3
- The 15-count is four windows, not one storm. November 2025 was ignored. February 2026 preceded a Q1 loss of about 4.3%. The May–June mega-cluster has been followed, so far, by a rally of about 4.6–4.8%.
- June 29 completed an 11+ cluster with the S&P at 7,440. That is the cluster Goepfert’s −3.5% average would apply to. The average has not shown up yet.
- Nasdaq’s 16-in-two-months is a different thermometer. Do not paste it onto Bluekurtic’s 15.
- The broad-universe last fire on June 23 is why an independent tracker can be “inactive” on August 21 while the S&P three-month count is 15.
- Bluekurtic’s “lower two weeks later every time since 1970” streak after the 11th trigger broke: S&P up about 2.9% three weeks later. Small samples break.
- Q2 2026 about +15% after a weak Q1 is the bull case sitting on top of the same split tape the Omen is flagging.
Next: what history actually paid
Part 4 leaves 2026’s diary and scores the backtest. 1987’s rare single-signal hit. 2000, 2007–08, February 2020. The 2018 record of 16 and the 19–20% dump into Christmas. The 2013 cluster of 10 that the uptrend ignored under QE3. 2017’s fires before the real break in early 2018. Late 2021 into the 2022 bear. StockCharts’ ~20% raw hit rate. Goepfert’s seven clusters of 11+ since 1965.
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Hindenburg Omen 2026 · What history paid
What History Actually Paid: 1987, 2013, 2018, and an 80% Miss Rate
The 15-count is being sold as September 2018. That analog is real. So are 2013, 2017, and a raw hit rate near 20 percent. This is the scoreboard — sample sizes attached.
The viral version is: it caught 1987 and 2008, 15 is almost the 2018 record, 19% dump incoming. The research version is more boring and more useful. Clusters matter. Single fires mostly do not. And even clusters are a small sample with a wide range of aftermaths.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice. Parts 1–3 covered the signal, the arithmetic, and the 2025–2026 diary.
Part 3 left 2026 on the table: one winter cluster that preceded a down quarter, one summer mega-cluster that has been followed, so far, by a rally. Part 4 asks what that pattern looks like when you zoom out to 1970. Not as folklore. As a table.
Waiting through an 80 percent miss rate is the unglamorous part of using this indicator. Most of the calendar after a fire is ordinary time.
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The cluster scoreboard
These are the named stretches this series is willing to put on a page. Counts vary by universe and cutoff — the same warning from Part 2. Aftermaths are the public record, not a promise that 2026 will rhyme.
| Cluster | Aftermath | Read |
|---|---|---|
| October 1987 | One of the few single-signal “hits.” Crash followed (Black Monday, October 19). | Hit |
| 2000 | Large cluster, then the dot-com bear. | Hit |
| 2007–08 | Large cluster, then the global financial crisis bear. | Hit |
| 2013 (cluster of 10) | Uptrend continued. QE3 was still running. | Miss |
| 2017 | Multiple fires. Market kept rising. The real break was early 2018. | Early / miss |
| September 2018 (record 16) | S&P peaked within days, then fell about 19–20% into Christmas. | Hit — the analog |
| February 2020 | Cluster, then the pandemic crash. The Omen was a symptom. The catalyst was not breadth. | Hit, incomplete |
| Late 2021 / early 2022 | Consecutive signals, then the 2022 bear. | Hit |
| November 2025 | 5 fires. Market ignored them. (Part 3.) | Miss |
| February 2026 | Cluster, then the March 2026 drawdown. Q1 S&P about −4.3%. | Paid, modest |
| May–June 2026 (11+) | Completed June 29 at 7,440. Mid-August ~7,786, up ~4.6–4.8%. | Not paid (yet) |
Two things jump off that table. First, the famous crashes are on it. That is why the name sells. Second, so are 2013, 2017, and November 2025. “It caught 1987 and 2008” is true and incomplete: it also caught a lot of nothing.
Goepfert’s numbers, not the folklore
Jason Goepfert at SentimenTrader, whose data MarketWatch used on August 15, 2026, is the cleanest published scoreboard for “what happens after.” These are averages, not destinies. Sample sizes are small. Label them as estimates.
| Setup (since 1970 unless noted) | Average 3-month S&P | Average 1-year S&P |
|---|---|---|
| Random three-month window | +2.2% | — |
| After any Hindenburg signal | −2.0% | +7.4% (vs +9.1% baseline) |
| After 11+ Omens in 3 months (7 clusters since 1965) | −3.5% | +2.6% (more than 6 points below long-run average) |
“An individual signal is not all that informative, but when they fire consistently over weeks or even months, the false-positive rate tends to go down.”
— Jason Goepfert, SentimenTrader
Read those rows slowly. After a cluster of 11 or more, the average one-year return is still positive — plus 2.6 percent. It is a bad year relative to history, not a guaranteed wipeout. The three-month average of minus 3.5 percent is the number crash posts skip past on the way to 2018’s 19 percent.
StockCharts puts the raw hit rate around 20 percent, meaning roughly 80 percent of individual fires do not precede a significant decline. Tom McClellan’s line, for years, has been that a cluster is a “pay extra attention” sign, not a sell-everything alarm. Dave Keller’s analogy remains the right one: a tornado siren raises the odds of a storm. It does not schedule the tornado.
Chuck Jaffe’s interview with that question in the title — does the Omen mean the market is due to blow up? — is the McClellan posture in broadcast form.
Money Life with Chuck Jaffe: the blow-up question, answered in the McClellan register — attention, not a calendar.
The analog bears want: September 2018
Sixteen signals. The record. The S&P peaked within days. By Christmas the index was down about 19 to 20 percent. That is the graphic Barchart put next to 2026’s 15. It is a real analog. It is also one row on a table that has seven cluster rows since 1965, not a law of nature.
2018 had more than a split tape. It had a Federal Reserve still raising rates, a growth scare, and a December liquidity air pocket. The Omen was on the tape. It was not the cause. Treating “16 then 19%” as a transferable constant is how a research note becomes a prophecy.
The dump into Christmas is why this analog lives in December imagery. The market’s worst weeks that year were a holiday-season event. That does not make a gift basket a hedge. It does mean the 2018 rhyme, if it comes, has a calendar people already understand.
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The analog bulls want: 2013, and 2017
A cluster of 10 in 2013. The uptrend continued. QE3 was still running. That is the closest “lots of Omens, no crash” case, and it happened in a policy regime that was still flooding the system with liquidity. If you think 2026’s mega-cap/AI bid is a cousin of that liquidity, 2013 is your analog. If you think 2026 is 2018 with extra steps, you will ignore 2013. Both are on the same table. Neither is probability 1.
2017 is the early-warning problem. Multiple fires. The market kept rising. The real break was early 2018 — and then the record cluster arrived in September. An indicator that can be loud a year before the break is not useless. It is also not a timing tool. Keller and McClellan have been saying that longer than this cycle has existed.
The 2013–2017 stretch is also a reminder that a split tape can persist inside a bull market that still pays anyone who stayed. Leadership concentration is not automatically a tombstone. Part 5 will take that into 2026’s AI tape. Here it is enough to say: the Omen has been early, and it has been loud at the wrong time, and those episodes are as much “history” as 1987.
Bull markets that ignore the siren still produce winners. That is not an argument to ignore internals. It is an argument against treating a miss as a moral failure of the people who stayed invested.
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The hits, without the mythology
1987 is the origin story. It is also a bad template. One of the few times a single signal “worked,” followed by a one-day crash that no breadth indicator timed to the hour. Using 1987 to sell a 2026 calendar is marketing.
2000 and 2007–08 were large clusters in front of genuine bears. Credit, valuation, and (in 2008) a banking system were the causes. The Omen was a symptom of a market that was already splitting before the index broke. That is the honest use of those years: internals deteriorated first. It is not “the Omen caused the GFC.”
February 2020 preceded the pandemic crash. So did a lot of other things. A cluster in front of an exogenous shock gets to count as a hit on a scoreboard and still not be a forecasting miracle.
Late 2021 / early 2022 is the most recent clean sequence before this cycle: consecutive signals, then a bear. Useful. Still a small sample.
Barchart’s own 2024 explainer — “Predictor of Doom or Indifference” — is the right title for this whole section. Doom and indifference are both in the data. The indifference is the part crash accounts crop out.
Barchart, 2024: doom or indifference. Watch this before treating 2018 as a template with a 1.00 probability.
The post-2010 record is spotty on purpose
Investopedia’s July 2026 update still calls the post-2010 record “spotty” and “a false alarm more often than not.” That is not a blogger’s hedge. It is the consensus of people who have run the tape through ETFs, passive flows, and mega-cap concentration — market structure Miekka did not have.
A broad-universe backtest of 25 confirmed clusters since 2010 is even more deflating for the crash calendar: median six-month return after a cluster was still positive (+5.2%), just worse than the baseline (+6.9%), with a higher chance of a 10 percent drawdown (38% vs 22%). Fragility, not a crash timer. Higher odds of a bruise. Not a dated 19 percent.
Estimate, labeled. Seven clusters of 11+ since 1965 is a tiny sample. Twenty-five clusters since 2010 is still small. Averages of −3.5 percent and +5.2 percent can both be true and still leave 2026 inside a wide cone. Anyone quoting these numbers as a schedule is doing marketing.
tastylive’s options-market take is the skeptical twin of Goepfert: is this a real warning or a false alarm, and what is priced? It belongs here because Part 4 is the “do not outsource the calendar” chapter.
tastylive: warning versus false alarm, with the options market as a second opinion. Use it as a check on 2018-only storytelling.
False alarms also leave a mess: extra charts, extra exports, extra conviction that has to be cleaned up when the oscillator goes positive and the index does not fall. That is not a trade. It is housekeeping.
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History is a long sit
Running 1970–2026 in your head is a desk job. The 2018 analog and the 2013 analog do not resolve faster if you are uncomfortable. Climate at the chair is not a market view.
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The fair historical reading
Put 2026’s 15-count on this scoreboard and it is: the second-highest three-month concentration since at least 1970, one shy of 2018’s 16, with a winter cluster that already paid a modest down quarter and a summer cluster that has not paid the −3.5 percent average yet.
What history supports:
- Single fires are mostly noise (~20% raw hit rate).
- Dense clusters have been associated with below-average forward returns and a higher chance of a 10%+ drawdown over the next 1–6 months.
- The closest analog by count is 2018. The closest analog by “cluster then nothing” is 2013. 2017 is the analog for being early.
What history does not support:
- A dated crash. 2018’s 19–20% is one path, not the mean.
- A 1987 or 2008 analogue by itself. Those breaks had credit stress, positioning, and a catalyst. The Omen was a symptom.
- Ignoring an intact primary trend because a counter hit 15. The 2013 row exists.
Key takeaways from Part 4
- StockCharts: ~20% raw hit rate, ~80% false positives on single fires.
- Goepfert: after any signal, avg 3-month S&P −2% vs +2.2% random. After 11+ in three months (n=7 since 1965): −3.5% at three months, +2.6% at one year.
- 2018 (16 fires, ~19–20% into Christmas) is the bear analog. 2013 (10 fires, QE3, uptrend continued) is the bull analog. 2017 was early.
- 1987, 2000, 2007–08, 2020, and 2022 are real hits. They had causes beyond breadth.
- Since 2010, 25 broad-universe clusters: median 6-month return still +5.2% vs +6.9% baseline; 10% drawdown odds 38% vs 22%. Fragility, not a timer.
- Investopedia 2026: post-2010 record “spotty,” false alarm more often than not.
Next: why 2026 is a split market
Part 5 leaves the backtest and returns to this tape. AI and mega-cap concentration. ETFs and passive flows. Why simultaneous new highs and new lows are more normal now than in Miekka’s 1990s. The 72 percent of S&P members still above their 200-day averages. Q1 −4.3% against Q2 +15%. And the related warning Keller keeps pairing with the Omen: Titanic Syndrome, when new lows start to dominate new highs.
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Hindenburg Omen 2026 · The split tape
Why 2026 Is a Split Market — and Not Yet a Titanic
The Omen is a dispersion detector. This year’s AI-led averages, passive flows, and a 72 percent 200-day breadth reading explain why it keeps firing without the index looking like 2008.
Part 4 said a cluster is fragility, not a dated crash. Part 5 asks what kind of fragility this is. 2026 has been a textbook split tape: headline indexes in an uptrend, leadership concentrated in AI and mega-cap growth, and a large cohort already making 52-week lows. That is the condition the Omen was built to catch. It is not, by itself, Titanic Syndrome.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice.
The August snapshot
As of the August 21 close, the S&P 500 sat near 7,674 — above its 50-day average around 7,541 and its 200-day around 7,096, and only a few percent off the August 13 high near 7,799. About 72 percent of S&P members were still above their 200-day averages. First-quarter total return was about minus 4.3 percent. Second quarter was about plus 15 percent.
Those four numbers cannot be a crash tape. They can be a split tape. The Omen does not require the index to be falling. It requires the index to still be in an uptrend while both tails of the high-low list are elevated and short-term breadth momentum is already negative. 2026 has spent months in that shape.
Who is holding the average up
Leadership is concentrated in artificial intelligence, information technology, and communication services. Those groups have been a huge share of S&P market cap. A cap-weighted index can print records while equal-weight and the median stock do something else. That is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic. If a handful of mega-caps are making 52-week highs, they can satisfy the “new highs” side of the Omen on the same day a long list of smaller names is making 52-week lows.
Keller’s “weak mega caps, strong opportunities” framing is the live version of that split: the household names are not a monolith, and the opportunity set is not the index.
Dave Keller, CMT: mega-cap weakness is not the same as “the market” being weak — and the reverse is also true. The Omen lives in that gap.
The other side of the same week can look like growth flipping back on. That is not a contradiction. It is what a split market feels like from the inside: leadership rotating, not a single regime you can screenshot.
Growth back on the S&P is compatible with a Hindenburg cluster. The indicator fires on simultaneous extremes, not on “growth is dead.”
Who is already in a bear market
On the same days the leaders make highs, a large number of stocks have been making 52-week lows: healthcare, some cyclicals, rate-sensitive names, and smaller Nasdaq issues. That is the “civil war” reading. It does not mean every hospital operator or every regional name is finished. It means the low list is populated enough, on enough days, to clear a 2.2 or 2.8 percent hurdle while the high list is also populated.
Healthcare is the cleanest example of a group that can be in its own drawdown while the S&P looks fine. If you only watch the cap-weighted index, you will not see it. If you watch new lows, you will.
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Cyclicals and “the rest of the real economy” are the other tail. Sports, travel, hardware, the analog world — they do not need to be in a formal recession for a subset to print 52-week lows on an AI-up day. That is enough for a split-tape detector.
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Why this tape prints more Omens than Miekka’s
Jim Miekka built the signal on a 1990s NYSE. The 2026 tape has ETFs, passive flows, mega-cap concentration, and algos. Those four produce more days with simultaneous new highs and new lows than the market he studied.
- Cap-weighted indexes and ETFs pull money into whatever already has the biggest weight. Leaders get more leadership. Laggards do not automatically get bid just because the S&P is up.
- Passive flows are not evil. They are mechanical. They amplify whatever the index already is. In an AI-heavy S&P, that is a split waiting to be measured.
- Algos and systematic overlays trade the index and the leaders more than they trade the 2,000th name. Breadth can rot while futures stay bid.
- Nasdaq’s issue mix — more speculative, more unprofitable, more rate-sensitive small names — makes a two-sided high-low list easier to print. That is why Nasdaq logged a record 16 Omens in two months by mid-July while the NYSE was merely loud.
A split market is now a more normal feature of an AI-led bull, not automatically a 1987 setup. Investopedia’s 2026 update still calls the post-2010 record “spotty” and “a false alarm more often than not.” Part 4’s 25-cluster backtest since 2010 — median six-month return still positive — is the quantitative version of that sentence. Market structure changed. The Omen’s name did not.
Opinion, labeled. If you only remember one structural point, remember this: more split days does not automatically mean more crashes. It can mean the detector is firing on a feature of the modern tape. That is an argument for raising the burden of proof, not for deleting the indicator.
The leadership that holds the average up is also the leadership in your pocket. Mega-cap communication and technology are not an abstraction. They are the devices the tape is watched on.
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Titanic Syndrome is the next question, not this one
Keller and StockCharts pair the Hindenburg Omen with a related warning: Titanic Syndrome, when new lows start to overtake new highs. The Omen is both tails elevated in an uptrend. Titanic is the low list winning. One is a split. The other is a market that has chosen a side — the wrong one.
| Hindenburg Omen | Titanic Syndrome | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see | Many new highs and many new lows, index still in an uptrend, McClellan Oscillator negative. | New lows overtaking new highs. The low list is in charge. |
| What it means | Leadership is splitting. Internals disagree with the average. | The split has resolved — toward damage. |
| August 2026 | Fired often enough to make a 15-count. Index still near highs. | Not the base case: 72% of S&P members still above the 200-day; highs still competitive on the days that counted. |
The August Monday in Part 2 was 297 highs versus 149 lows. That is a split. It is not lows overtaking highs. If this tape turns into Titanic Syndrome, you will not need a viral graphic to see it: the low list will dominate, the 200-day membership will roll over, and the oscillator will not be the only thing below zero. Until then, using “Hindenburg” as a synonym for “sinking” is a category error.
Rotation is the live alternative to sinking. Tech can drop while value pops and the cap-weighted index barely notices — or notices late. That is a hidden bull in one sleeve and a bear in another. It is also catnip for a high-low detector.
Keller on rotation: the hidden bull is why an Omen cluster and a rising S&P can coexist. Watch this next to the Titanic table, not instead of it.
Index up, internals rotting
The McClellan Oscillator spent long stretches negative in 2026 even while the index was rising. That is the “index up, internals rotting” setup in the original design. It does not require a recession print. It requires the average stock’s short-term advance/decline momentum to roll over before the cap-weighted index does.
Q1’s −4.3 percent was the modest bill for the winter cluster. Q2’s +15 percent was the bill not arriving after the summer mega-cluster — so far. Both can sit on the same split tape. A detector that only fires when the index is already down is a rear-view mirror. A detector that fires through a +15 percent quarter is going to look, in real time, like a broken siren. History (Part 4) says it is usually a siren with a high false-positive rate. Structure (this page) says 2026 is built to produce those false-looking days.
The analog economy is still on the tape. It just does not set the S&P’s level the way it did when Miekka was writing. Collecting that fact is not nostalgia. It is why NYSE-only and Nasdaq-only counts diverge.
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The rest of the world is not the S&P
A split market is an argument for looking outside the cap-weighted list — including at things that have nothing to do with a 52-week high. That is not a hedge. It is perspective.
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Key takeaways from Part 5
- As of August 21: S&P ~7,674, above the 50-day and 200-day, 72% of members still above the 200-day. That is an uptrend with a split underneath, not a broken primary trend.
- Leaders: AI, information technology, communication services. Laggards printing lows: healthcare, some cyclicals, rate-sensitive names, smaller Nasdaq issues.
- ETFs, passive flows, mega-cap concentration, and algos produce more simultaneous new-high/new-low days than Miekka’s 1990s tape. More Omens does not automatically mean more 1987s.
- Q1 −4.3% and Q2 +15% are the same split tape, billed and then not billed.
- Titanic Syndrome is new lows overtaking new highs. The August specimen (297 vs 149) was a split, not a sinking. Watch that handoff. Do not rename the Omen as the Titanic.
Next: why the crash headlines overreach
Part 6 is the prosecution of the viral graphic. Counting method is the story. The warning window may already be closed. Market structure has changed. The June 29 cluster has already “failed” in the short run. The indicator has a habit of being early, or loud at the wrong time — 2013, 2017, November 2025. “It caught 1987 and 2008” is true and incomplete.
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Hindenburg Omen 2026 · The overreach
Why “15 Hindenburg Omens” Is Not a Crash Calendar
The 15-count is real. The crash schedule built on top of it is not. Five reasons the viral graphic overreaches — and the one thing it still gets right.
You now have the signal, the arithmetic, the diary, the history, and the 2026 structure. This page is the prosecution. Treat the 15-count as evidence of a split, fragile tape, not as a dated crash forecast. The graphic that jumped from Bluekurtic to Barchart on August 19 collapsed a research object into a siren. Here is where that collapse happens.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice.
Crash accounts needed five things to be true at once: that 15 is the same statistic as 2018’s 16, that the warning is still live, that 2026’s tape is Miekka’s tape, that the average path after a cluster has already arrived, and that the Omen does not cry wolf. None of those five survive contact with the parts you just read. Take them in order.
1. Counting method is the story
Jim Miekka said extra signals inside 30 trading days should be ignored. Cluster researchers count them. That is not a rounding difference. It is two instruments.
A Miekka follower in 2026 might have two or three distinct warning regimes — winter, late spring, maybe a short August restart — depending on when the McClellan Oscillator went positive. A cluster-counter has 15 in a three-month lookback. Headlines prefer the larger integer. Barchart did not invent that integer. It amplified Bluekurtic’s cluster math. Treating “15” as if Miekka had declared a 15-alarm fire is a category error Part 2 already showed on a single day: the August Monday passed the two-to-one highs test by one stock.
Add the other house rules and the integer moves again. NYSE-only versus Nasdaq versus all U.S. common stocks. 2.2 percent versus 2.8 percent. WSJ/Barron’s breadth versus other feeds. A handful of issues can flip a day from Omen to not. Nasdaq’s record 16 in two months is not Bluekurtic’s 15. The broad-universe last fire on June 23 is not the August 10–11 add-on. Mixing them is how a research note becomes a prophecy.
Keller’s mid-cycle tape — Omen on the same show as earnings and a Netflix breakout — is the adult version of this. The signal is one input. It is not the show.
Dave Keller, CMT: the Omen on a tape that also has earnings revisions and leadership breakouts. That is how a professional uses it. A crash calendar is not.
2. The warning window may already be closed
McClellan’s formulation deactivates when the oscillator turns positive. By Friday August 14 the NYSE McClellan Oscillator was about +39. That is not a wiggle around zero. It is a breadth thrust in the other direction. Under Miekka, the live warning dies there.
One independent tracker had the Omen inactive as of August 21: three of four conditions met, but new lows were only 1.35 percent (needed ≥2.2 percent), and there were zero triggers in the trailing 30 trading days. That tracker is the broad-universe clock whose last fire was June 23. Bluekurtic’s S&P count can still say 15. Both can be true. Only one of them is a live siren. The viral graphic does not say which.
*Broad-universe tracker, not Bluekurtic. The zero and the 15 are different clocks.
A warning that cannot turn off is not a warning. It is a worldview. If you are still treating August 19’s graphic as a live 30-day clock, you are using cluster persistence as if it were Miekka’s kill-switch. It is not.
3. Market structure has changed
Part 5 laid out the mechanics: ETFs, passive flows, mega-cap concentration, and algos produce more days with simultaneous new highs and new lows than the 1980s–2000s tape Miekka studied. A split market is now a more normal feature of an AI-led bull, not automatically a 1987 setup.
Investopedia’s July 2026 update still calls the post-2010 record “spotty” and “a false alarm more often than not.” That sentence is the structural point in one line. If the detector fires more often because the tape is more concentrated, then “15 is almost 16” is a comparison across two different machines. 2018 had a split tape and a Fed still raising, a growth scare, and a December liquidity air pocket. Copying the integer without copying the regime is the overreach.
Opinion, labeled. More Omens in 2026 is evidence that leadership is narrow. It is not, by itself, evidence that 1987’s plumbing is back. If you want 1987, you need credit stress, positioning, and a catalyst. Breadth is a symptom. Headlines treat it as a cause.
Healthcare names making 52-week lows on an AI-up day is part of that structure, not a side quest. The cap-weighted index can ignore a whole sector for a long time. That is a split. It is not a scheduled index crash.
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4. This cluster has already “failed” in the short run
The 11-plus cluster completed June 29 with the S&P at 7,440. Goepfert’s average path after such clusters is a three-month loss of about 3.5 percent. Instead the S&P rallied almost 5 percent into mid-August — around 7,786, up about 4.6 to 4.8 percent — with 72 percent of members still above their 200-day averages. Second-quarter 2026 returned about +15 percent after a weak first quarter.
Bluekurtic’s own July 30 claim was sharper still: after the 11th three-month trigger, they said that since 1970 the S&P was lower two weeks later every single time, median loss 4 percent. That streak then broke. The S&P was up about 2.9 percent three weeks later. Small samples break. A graphic that does not mention the break is not research. It is a still frame.
“Failed in the short run” is not “cannot decline from here.” It is a statement about the path that was supposed to be the tell. The tell did not show. The 2018 analog had the peak within days of the cluster. This analog had a rally. If you are going to use 2018, you owe the reader that sentence.
Fear-is-gone headlines are the mirror image of crash headlines: both over-read a short window. The real test after a cluster is whether new lows start to dominate and whether the oscillator can stay positive — Part 7’s job. The real test is not a screenshot from August 19.
After the siren: the test is forward internals, not the viral count. Use this as a posture check, not as a new prophecy.
A bounce after a siren is also, in ordinary life, a bounce. The market’s short-run “failure” of the average path is the thing crash posts will not screenshot. Households screenshot the other kind of bounce.
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5. It has a habit of being early, or loud at the wrong time
2013: cluster of 10, uptrend continued, QE3 still running. 2017: multiple fires, market kept rising, the real break was early 2018. November 2025: five fires, shrugged off. Those are not trivia. They are the median personality of the indicator.
The 2020 cluster did precede the pandemic crash. So did a lot of other things. “It caught 1987 and 2008” is true and incomplete: it also caught a lot of nothing. StockCharts’ raw hit rate around 20 percent is the incomplete part, quantified. An 80 percent false-positive rate on single fires is not a rounding error you hide under a cluster. Clusters improve the signal. They do not turn it into a calendar. Goepfert’s own one-year average after 11-plus clusters is still positive — plus 2.6 percent. A bad year relative to history. Not a dated wipeout.
Being early is the most expensive way to be “right.” A 2017 fire that “called” 2018 is a year of missed returns. A November 2025 fire that called nothing is a month of fear with no payoff. The 15-count can still be a correct description of internals and a terrible date to sell. Those are not opposites. They are the same indicator doing both jobs it has always done.
People celebrate the rally they were told not to expect. That is not an argument that internals are healthy. It is an argument that the calendar was fake.
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What the graphic still gets right
Prosecution is not acquittal. The 15-count is still evidence of a split, fragile tape. Index strength is not the same as market health. A large group of stocks is already in drawdown while a few leaders hold the averages up. Historically, this much clustering has been associated with below-average forward returns and a higher chance of a 10 percent-plus decline over the next one to six months. The closest analog by count remains 2018. None of that was invented by crash Twitter.
The overreach is the schedule. The fair reading — Goepfert’s, Keller’s, McClellan’s — is: one Omen is noise; a cluster of 11–15 in three months is real deterioration in internals that has, on a small sample, been followed by weaker-than-average returns. The 2018 analog is the bear case. The 2013 analog and the post-June 2026 rally are the bull case. Neither is a probability of 1.
| Claim in the graphic | What survives | What does not |
|---|---|---|
| 15 times in 3 months | True as Bluekurtic cluster-count for the S&P. | True as Miekka’s 30-day warning. True as Nasdaq’s 16. True as a live siren on Aug 21. |
| Second-highest since 1970 | True on that methodology. Record is 16 in Sept 2018. | A transferable constant. 2018 had a different rate and liquidity regime. |
| 19% dump incoming | 2018 did fall ~19–20% into Christmas after 16 fires. | The mean. Goepfert’s cluster average is −3.5% at 3 months, +2.6% at 1 year. This cluster rallied ~5% after June 29. |
| It caught 1987 and 2008 | Those years are on the hit list. | The misses: 2013, 2017, Nov 2025, and ~80% of single fires. |
The calendar was fake. The rest of the calendar is not.
A crash date that does not arrive is still a week in a household. Flowers, a bottle, the ordinary September that follows an August graphic — none of that is a hedge. It is what the overreach stole attention from.
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Key takeaways from Part 6
- 15 is cluster math. Miekka ignored extra fires inside 30 days and killed the warning when the oscillator went positive.
- By August 14 the NYSE McClellan was about +39. By August 21 a 2.2% tracker had new lows at 1.35% and zero fires in 30 days. The live siren and the viral count are not the same object.
- More split days in an ETF/mega-cap tape is not automatically 1987. Investopedia 2026: post-2010 record “spotty.”
- The 11+ cluster completed June 29. Average path −3.5% at three months. Actual path: about +4.6 to +4.8% into mid-August. Bluekurtic’s “lower every time in two weeks” streak broke (+2.9% three weeks later).
- 2013, 2017, November 2025: early or loud at the wrong time. “Caught 1987 and 2008” without those rows is marketing.
- What survives: a split, fragile tape and below-average forward-return odds on a small sample. What does not: a dated crash.
Next: how to use it without getting wrecked
Continue to Part 7 — How to use it without getting wrecked →
[Part 6 Complete. Say "Go" or "Proceed" to generate Part 7.] · Part 7 is ready →
Hindenburg Omen 2026 · The playbook
How to Use the Hindenburg Omen Without Getting Wrecked
Tighten risk. Watch whether new lows take the tape. See if the McClellan Oscillator can stay positive. Do not treat “15 Omens” as a date. This is a smoke detector. It is a terrible calendar.
If you use it at all, use it the way Keller and McClellan do: raise attention, shrink the chance of a large unforced error, and wait for the tape to choose a side. Part 6 killed the crash calendar. Part 7 is what to do with the smoke detector that remains.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice. This is a process, not a trade list.
A cluster of 11–15 in three months is a real deterioration in internals. Goepfert’s small sample says forward returns have been worse than average and the odds of a 10 percent drawdown have been higher. That is a reason to be harder to hurt. It is not a reason to outsource the next six months to a screenshot.
The playbook — three watches
1. Tighten risk. Do not “sell everything.”
Tom McClellan’s line is “pay extra attention,” not liquidate. Dave Keller’s tornado siren raises the odds of a storm. It does not schedule the tornado. In practice that means: smaller size where you were already stretched, fewer new risk-on adds, wider respect for the 200-day on the names you actually hold, and a written plan for what you will do if new lows start to dominate. It does not mean converting a 72 percent-above-200-day S&P into cash because Bluekurtic printed 15.
The February 2026 cluster “paid” with a first-quarter loss of about 4.3 percent — a bruise, not a wipeout. The May–June cluster has not paid the −3.5 percent average yet. A process that sold the whole book on June 29 missed a roughly 5 percent rally into mid-August. Tightening is reversible. A calendar sale often is not, emotionally.
2. Watch whether new lows start dominating new highs.
That is Titanic Syndrome — the related StockCharts/Keller warning from Part 5. The Omen is both tails elevated in an uptrend. Titanic is the low list winning. The August Monday was 297 highs versus 149 lows. That is a split. If the next month’s tapes start printing more lows than highs, and the 72 percent 200-day membership starts rolling over, you do not need the word Hindenburg anymore. The market has chosen a side.
Until that handoff, treating every extra cluster-count as a sinking is the error Part 6 prosecuted. The watch is the ratio, not the integer.
3. See if the McClellan Oscillator can stay positive.
Miekka’s kill-switch is the adult part of the original rule. Below zero, short-term breadth momentum has rolled. Above zero, the warning dies even if 30 days have not elapsed. August 14’s reading around +39 was a deactivation, not a rounding error. The playbook question from here is not “did we hit 15?” It is “can this oscillator stay above zero, or does it roll back under and relight the four boxes?”
A thrust to +39 that immediately fails is different from a thrust that holds. You will not get that distinction from a three-month lookback graphic.
Keller, May 2024: an “initial sell signal,” not a dated crash. Watch how a professional frames the first fire — then apply that posture to a cluster, not the other way around.
A one-page checklist
| Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|
| Are all four boxes lit on your universe and cutoff today? | Start (or refresh) a 30-trading-day watch. Do not add a “15th alarm.” | You do not have an Omen. You may still have a split. Do not force the name. |
| Is the McClellan Oscillator below zero? | Condition 4 is live. Internals are not confirming the index. | Miekka’s warning is off, even if cluster-counters are still adding. |
| Are new lows overtaking new highs? | Titanic, not just Hindenburg. Raise urgency. This is the handoff. | Still a split. Tighten, don’t liquidate on the name alone. |
| Is the S&P (or NYSE Composite) still above the 50-day / 200-day, with decent 200-day membership? | Primary trend intact. The Omen is doing its job as an early, noisy detector. | You may already be late. Breadth warnings after breakdown are post-mortems. |
| Are you mixing NYSE, Nasdaq, S&P, and all-U.S. counts? | Stop. Pick one tape and stay on it. | Good. Label the desk on every number you repeat. |
What not to do
- Do not treat “15 Hindenburg Omens” as a scheduled crash. The indicator’s own history is that it is a decent smoke detector and a terrible calendar.
- Do not count extra fires inside 30 days and then claim Miekka’s authority. That is cluster math wearing his name.
- Do not ignore a McClellan reading of +39 because a three-month lookback still says 15.
- Do not paste Nasdaq’s 16-in-two-months onto Bluekurtic’s 15 and call it confirmation. Different thermometers.
- Do not sell a name you would otherwise hold solely because one August Monday passed 297 ≤ 298 by a single stock.
- Do not forget 2013, 2017, and November 2025. Early and loud-at-the-wrong-time is the median personality, not a footnote.
- Do not confuse the Omen with Titanic Syndrome. Split is not sinking. Watch for the handoff.
3EDGE’s walkthrough is the institutional version of that list: the Omen as a research object, not a personality. It belongs here because Part 7 is process.
3EDGE Asset Management: the Omen without the disaster soundtrack. Pair with Keller’s “initial sell signal” above.
Tools, not talismans
You do not need a new platform to run this. You need a high-low list, an advance/decline line, a McClellan Oscillator (19-day EMA minus 39-day EMA of NYSE net advances), a 50-day and 200-day on the index you actually care about, and a membership count of how many S&P names sit above the 200-day. StockCharts, McClellan Financial Publications, and the exchange’s own daily high-low data are the boring stack. If a desk will not tell you its universe and cutoff, do not use its integer.
A watch that lasts 30 sessions is a machine that stays on: a connection, power, a box that can hold the panels. That is plumbing. It is not a view on the S&P.
The unglamorous stack
Live quotes need a network. A box that stays up needs power. A shop that can replace a cable on a Sunday is not a hedge fund. It is how a 30-day watch actually happens.
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A 30-day watch is a household
The playbook fails in the same place most process fails: sleep, family, the overnight session you cannot stare at. Tightening risk includes not making 2 a.m. decisions because a cluster-count went around on social media. If you have people in the house, the oscillator can wait until morning. Titanic Syndrome, if it arrives, will still be on the tape at the open.
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Grounding the body after a day of high-low lists is not a market view either. It is what “pay extra attention” has to survive if it is going to last 30 sessions.
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And if the calendar sale never comes — if this cluster rhymes with 2013 instead of 2018 — ordinary life continues. That is the point of not using a smoke detector as a calendar.
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Not a recommendation. Nothing in this playbook is an instruction to buy, sell, or hold any security, fund, or strategy. Position size, tax lots, and time horizon are personal. The Omen does not know yours.
What the playbook says on this tape, in one paragraph
As of late August 2026: the S&P is still in an uptrend near 7,674, with about 72 percent of members above the 200-day. The three-month S&P cluster-count is 15, which is historically rare and associated with weaker-than-average forward returns. The McClellan Oscillator’s jump to about +39 on August 14 deactivates Miekka’s warning. New lows at 1.35 percent on August 21 do not clear a 2.2 percent hurdle. Titanic Syndrome is not the base case while highs still compete. The: extra attention, no new hero risk, watch the high-low ratio and the oscillator’s ability to stay positive, do not schedule a crash. If lows take over and the 200-day membership breaks, escalate. If they do not, you have paid the price of a smoke detector — some false alarms — and kept the primary trend.
Key takeaways from Part 7
- Three watches: tighten risk, high-low ratio (Titanic handoff), McClellan Oscillator staying positive.
- Start a 30-day clock on a four-box day in one labeled universe. Do not stack viral integers.
- Kill the warning when the oscillator goes positive. August 14’s +39 is that event on this tape.
- Do not sell the whole book because 297 ≤ 298 by one stock, and do not mix Nasdaq’s 16 with Bluekurtic’s 15.
- Smoke detector, not calendar. 2013, 2017, and November 2025 are what happen when you forget that.
- This is not investment advice. Process is not a ticker.
Next: FAQ and the honest bottom line
[Part 7 Complete. Say "Go" or "Proceed" to generate Part 8.] · Part 8 is ready →
Hindenburg Omen 2026 · FAQ and bottom line
FAQ: 15 Fires, Two Analogues, and the Honest Bottom Line
The questions this series was built to answer, the 2018 vs 2013 vs 2026 fork, the sources behind every number, and the fair reading one more time. Neither analogue is probability 1.
The 15-count is real. It is also being oversold as a crash siren. One Omen is noise. A cluster of 11–15 in three months is real internal deterioration with weaker-than-average forward returns on a small sample. 2018 is the bear case. 2013 and the post-June 2026 rally are the bull case. That is the whole series in four sentences.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is investment advice.
Questions people actually ask
Is the “15 times in a few months” claim real?
Yes, as a Bluekurtic Market Insights cluster-count for the S&P 500, amplified by Barchart on August 19, 2026. It is the second-highest three-month concentration since at least 1970. The record is 16, in September 2018. It is not Miekka’s original 30-day warning, and it is not Nasdaq’s 16-in-two-months or the broad-universe tracker’s 18 fires with a last print on June 23. See Part 1 and Part 3.
Does 15 Hindenburg Omens mean a crash is coming?
No. It means a historically rare cluster of split-tape days. Jason Goepfert’s figures (SentimenTrader, used by MarketWatch on August 15, 2026): after 11 or more Omens in three months — only seven such clusters since 1965 — average three-month S&P return about −3.5 percent, average one-year about +2.6 percent. Still positive at a year. Worse than average. Not a dated wipeout. StockCharts’ raw hit rate on single fires is about 20 percent. See Part 4.
Is this the same as September 2018?
By count, it is close: 15 versus 16. By aftermath, not yet. After 2018’s 16 the S&P peaked within days and later fell about 19–20 percent into Christmas. After 2026’s 11-plus cluster completed June 29 at 7,440, the S&P rallied about 4.6–4.8 percent into mid-August. 2018 also had a Fed still raising, a growth scare, and a December liquidity air pocket. Copying the integer without copying the regime is the overreach. See Part 4 and Part 6.
What is the Hindenburg Omen in one paragraph?
A market-breadth warning Jim Miekka built in the 1990s from Gerald Appel’s Split Market Sell Signal and Norman Fosback’s High-Low Logic Index. It fires when the index is still in an uptrend, new 52-week highs and new 52-week lows are both elevated (usually 2.2% or 2.8% of issues), highs are no more than twice lows, and the McClellan Oscillator is negative — all on the same day. Named after the 1937 airship disaster because the market can look intact while it is splitting underneath. See Part 1.
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Why do Bluekurtic, Nasdaq, and “the Omen is inactive” all disagree?
Different universes, different cutoffs, different counting rules. Bluekurtic cluster-counts S&P days. Nasdaq is noisier because mega-cap AI leadership is more extreme there (record 16 in two months by mid-July). A broad-universe tracker of all U.S. common stocks logged 18 fires in 2026, last on June 23, and by August 21 could report new lows at 1.35% (need ≥2.2%) and zero triggers in 30 days. Miekka ignored extra fires inside 30 days and killed the warning when the oscillator turned positive. Cluster-counters count every extra fire. See Part 2.
Is the warning still live in late August 2026?
Depends which clock. By Friday August 14 the NYSE McClellan Oscillator was about +39 — that deactivates Miekka. By August 21 a 2.2% tracker had new lows at 1.35% and could not fire. Bluekurtic’s three-month S&P count can still say 15. The live siren and the viral integer are not the same object. See Part 6.
What is the McClellan Oscillator?
A short-term breadth-momentum gauge: the 19-day EMA of NYSE net advances minus the 39-day EMA of NYSE net advances. Below zero, recent participation is weaker than the slightly longer trend. That is condition 4. A jump through zero kills Miekka’s warning. See Part 2.
What is Titanic Syndrome, and is that happening?
Keller/StockCharts: new lows overtaking new highs. The Omen is a split (both tails up, index still in an uptrend). Titanic is the low list winning. The August Monday was 297 highs versus 149 lows — a split, not a sinking. About 72 percent of S&P members were still above their 200-day averages in mid-August. Watch the handoff. Do not rename the Omen as the Titanic. See Part 5 and Part 7.
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Should I sell?
This series cannot answer that. It is not investment advice. The playbook in Part 7 is: tighten risk, watch the high-low ratio, see if the oscillator stays positive, do not schedule a crash. A process that sold everything on June 29 missed a roughly 5 percent rally. A process that ignored February 2026 sat through a down quarter of about 4.3 percent. Your tax lots, horizon, and sleep are not in the four boxes.
Why is it firing so much in 2026?
Because 2026 is a split tape: AI / information technology / communication services holding the cap-weighted averages up, while healthcare, some cyclicals, rate-sensitive names, and smaller Nasdaq issues print 52-week lows. ETFs, passive flows, mega-cap concentration, and algos produce more simultaneous new-high/new-low days than Miekka’s 1990s NYSE. More Omens does not automatically mean more 1987s. Investopedia’s July 2026 update still calls the post-2010 record “spotty.” See Part 5.
Did the June cluster “fail”?
In the short run, yes, relative to the average path. Goepfert’s mean after 11-plus clusters is about −3.5 percent at three months. This cluster completed June 29. By mid-August the S&P was up about 4.6–4.8 percent. Bluekurtic’s “lower two weeks later every time since 1970” streak after the 11th trigger also broke: S&P up about 2.9 percent three weeks later. Small samples break. Failure of the average path is not a guarantee the path cannot still decline. See Part 3 and Part 6.
What is the historical hit rate, really?
StockCharts: about 20 percent on raw single fires — roughly 80 percent false positives. Hits on the board: 1987, 2000, 2007–08, 2018, February 2020, late 2021/early 2022, February 2026 (modest). Misses: 2013 (cluster of 10, QE3, uptrend continued), 2017 (early), November 2025. Since 2010, a broad-universe backtest of 25 clusters: median six-month return still +5.2% vs +6.9% baseline; chance of a 10% drawdown 38% vs 22%. Fragility, not a timer. See Part 4.
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Can one stock really flip a day?
Yes. The August Monday MarketWatch flagged: 297 new NYSE highs, 149 new lows. Two times 149 is 298. Highs 297. Condition 3 passed by one issue. Threshold indicators are arbitrary at the edge. That is the cost of a binary fire. See Part 2.
Who created it, and is there an official formula?
Jim Miekka, 1990s. The version most technicians use is the one he gave Greg Morris for Morris’s 2006 book on breadth indicators. There is no official formula. 2.2% vs 2.8%, NYSE vs S&P vs Nasdaq vs all U.S. stocks, 30-day ignore vs cluster-count — those are house rules. Anyone quoting “the” Omen without those labels is selling a cleaner object than exists.
What should I actually watch from here?
Three things, from Part 7: (1) risk already on the books — tighten, don’t hero; (2) whether new lows overtake new highs; (3) whether the McClellan Oscillator can stay positive after the August 14 thrust to about +39. If lows take over and 200-day membership breaks, escalate. If they do not, you paid for a smoke detector.
2018 vs 2013 vs 2026
| 2018 (bear analogue) | 2013 (bull analogue) | 2026 (this tape) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Record 16 in September | Cluster of 10 | 15 in three months (S&P, Bluekurtic); 11+ completed June 29 |
| Aftermath | Peak within days; ~19–20% into Christmas | Uptrend continued (QE3 still running) | Feb cluster → Q1 ~−4.3%. June cluster → ~+4.6–4.8% into mid-August. Open from here. |
| Regime | Fed still raising; growth scare; December liquidity air pocket | QE3 liquidity | AI/mega-cap concentration, ETFs, passive flows. Index near 7,674; 72% above 200-day. |
| How to use it | The case for below-average returns and a real drawdown | The case that clusters can print inside a bull that still pays | Both cases are live. Neither is probability 1. |
2017 is the third analogue: multiple fires, market kept rising, the real break was early 2018. It is what “early” looks like. November 2025 is what “loud at the wrong time” looks like. Put those on the same table as 1987 and 2008 or you are doing marketing.
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The honest bottom line
Treat the 15-count as evidence of a split, fragile tape, not as a dated crash forecast.
What it is correctly flagging: index strength is not market health; a large group of stocks is already in drawdown while a few leaders hold the averages up; this much clustering has been associated with below-average forward returns and a higher chance of a 10 percent-plus decline over the next one to six months; the closest analogue by count is 2018.
What it is not: a timing tool (the June cluster is already weeks old and the index is higher); a 1987/2008 analogue by itself (those crashes had credit stress, positioning, and a catalyst); a reason to ignore an intact primary trend, a 200-day well below price, and 72 percent of members still above that average.
Goepfert: one Omen is noise; a cluster of 11–15 in three months is real deterioration. Keller: tornado siren, not a schedule. McClellan: pay extra attention, not sell everything. Miekka: 30 days, then the oscillator can kill it. The viral graphic kept the integer and threw away the rest.
If you use it at all, use Part 7: tighten risk, watch whether new lows start dominating new highs, see if the McClellan Oscillator can stay positive. Do not treat “15 Hindenburg Omens” as a scheduled crash. The indicator’s own history is that it is a decent smoke detector and a terrible calendar.
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Sources
These are the desks and documents this series actually used. Dates are as reported in the research file. No URL was invented.
- Bluekurtic Market Insights — 15 S&P fires in three months; 11th three-month trigger on July 30, 2026; two-week streak claim and the subsequent break (~+2.9% three weeks later).
- Barchart — amplification of the 15-count on August 19, 2026; Market on Close, August 21, 2026; 2024 explainer “Predictor of Doom or Indifference.”
- MarketWatch (August 15, 2026) — Goepfert/SentimenTrader figures; the August Monday tape (297 highs, 149 lows, McClellan about −6.4).
- Jason Goepfert / SentimenTrader — averages after any signal since 1970 (−2% at 3 months vs +2.2% random; +7.4% vs +9.1% at 1 year); 11+ clusters since 1965 (n=7): −3.5% at 3 months, +2.6% at 1 year.
- StockCharts / Dave Keller, CMT — ~20% raw hit rate; tornado-siren framing; Titanic Syndrome; live 2025–2026 episodes cited in Parts 1–7.
- McClellan Financial Publications / Tom McClellan — oscillator construction; “pay extra attention,” not sell-everything; deactivation when the oscillator turns positive.
- Investopedia — update dated July 26, 2026: post-2010 record “spotty,” “a false alarm more often than not.”
- Greg Morris — The Complete Guide to Market Breadth Indicators (2006), the Miekka formulation most desks still cite.
- Broad-universe / thetrading.tools-style trackers — 18 fires in 2026, last June 23; May–August peak of 12 in a 30-day window; 25 clusters since 2010 (median 6-month +5.2% vs +6.9%; 10% drawdown 38% vs 22%).
- Jim Miekka (original rule); Gerald Appel (Split Market Sell Signal); Norman Fosback (High-Low Logic Index).
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Key takeaways from the series
- 15 is a real, historically rare S&P cluster-count — second to 2018’s 16 — and a counting convention, not Miekka’s 30-day siren.
- Four 2025–26 windows: November shrugged; February paid ~−4.3% in Q1; May–June has not paid the −3.5% average (index ~+5% after June 29); July–August added the viral integer while the S&P stayed near highs.
- 2026 is a split market (AI leadership vs healthcare/cyclicals/small Nasdaq), amplified by ETFs and concentration — more Omens, not automatically more crashes.
- As of August 21: S&P ~7,674, 72% above the 200-day, McClellan had printed +39 on August 14, new lows 1.35% on a 2.2% tracker. Titanic Syndrome is not the base case.
- Use it as Keller and McClellan do. Do not use it as a calendar.
End of series
Start again at Part 1 if you landed here from a search. The fair reading does not get shorter than the intro box on this page. The crash calendar was the part that did not survive the tape.
[Part 8 Complete. Series finished.]
