New highs, narrowing crew.

The S&P added 2.4% across five sessions and closed Friday at the high. SPY now sits eight percent above its 50-day moving average and ten above its 200, with the slope on both still positive. The Trend reading is at the 98th percentile of our two-year window. The Follow-Through Day that triggered on March 31 is still active under classical CANSLIM rules — 27 trading days deep into its 30-day validity window. By the trend score alone, the rally is real.

But the composite Stance read did not move. It opened the week at 64 and closed it at 64 — held in the constructive band, locked at the 93rd percentile. Trend climbed six points; Macro slipped eight. The week's gain on the index was paid for inside the dashboard by an internal rotation, not a regime upgrade. SPY's volume came in at 63% of its trailing 50-day average — a 2.4% advance moved on roughly two-thirds of normal participation. That is the rally with strong trend and weak confirmation, and the gap is now the headline number on the dashboard.

Three subscores held the top quartile, two did not. Leadership at the 55th percentile is the same hover-around-median read it has held for nearly a month. Macro at the 17th percentile is the new quiet softening — the composite slipped eight points week-over-week on small day-by-day moves across all four inputs (curve compression, a touch of HY tightening offset, VIX coming off its prior-week spike). The 43-point gap between Trend (98th) and Leadership (55th) is unusually wide; in two years of daily snapshots, the slow-moving subscore leading the fast-moving one by this margin is rare. The composite is being carried by trend. The participation read is not confirming.

The picture above is the divergence in graphical form. Trend (gold) has run from the low-50s three weeks ago to 79 by Friday. Breadth (green) tracked it most of the way, ending at 72. Leadership (orange) is the flat line — bouncing between 36 and 45 across the entire fifteen sessions, ending the week at 41. When the index moves up that hard and the leadership composite goes nowhere, the rally is concentrated, not broad.

We pull every prior session in our two-year history where the five-vector reading sits within striking distance of today, weighting Stance more heavily. The closest match (2024-05-15) sits at distance 14.75. The fourth closest is at 22.9. These are similar regimes, not identical ones. Forward returns chart below — the highlighted line is the closest by Euclidean distance.

All four analogs ended green at +60 days, with returns from +0.6% to +4.6%. Three of four were green at +20. The interesting agreement is at +10: three of four were red. The August 2024 read drew down 2.8% before recovering. The October 2025 read drew down through +20 before turning. The pattern across these four prior reads is consistent — narrow-leadership-with-strong-trend reads chop in the second week, then resolve. None of the four broke down outright. CPI on Tuesday lands inside the analog's chop window.

Tech retook #1 from Energy this week — XLK from rank 2 to 1, XLE from 1 to 2. Materials moved up to #3, Industrials slipped one to #4. Utilities slid three ranks from 5 to 8 — defensive bid unwinding inside a risk-on tape. The bottom three are now Consumer Staples, Health Care, and Financials. XLF held last for the second straight week. Risk-on rotation in shape, but only Tech and Energy carry positive RS scores — every other sector reads negative.

Semiconductors holds #1 on the 1-month and 3-month boards — thirteen consecutive sessions at #1 on 1m. But Chips slipped to #5 on the 1-week board this week, displaced by the broader AI-buildout theme: Hardware (#2 on 1m), Electrical Equipment (#3), and Fabricated Products (#5, climbed from 6-month rank #13 to 1-week #4). Software jumped from 6-month #46 to 1-week #10 — the largest 6m→1w climb on the heatmap. Business Services made a similar move (6m #45 → 1w #17). The leadership board's top-25 turned over moderately — nine entered, nine exited — and the four-horizon-persistent group still numbers fourteen names. The narrow rally has direction. The bench is small but durable.

Top six on the leadership board, ranked by composite leadership score. AKAN holds rank #1; MXL climbed two to #2; BAND jumped five to #4. The factor bars on each card show what is earning the rank — trend smoothness, 52-week proximity, and volume velocity. Three of the six (AKAN, EDSA, AGL) show empty factor bars: those names appear on the leadership ranking but lack entries in the underlying decomposition table, so the factor lookup returns nothing. Different stocks earn rank differently, and the mix matters more than the rank itself.

Below the rank table, the leadership composite breaks into five sub-signals. Equal-weight versus cap-weight reads -0.063 today, worsening from -0.038 a week ago. That is the cleanest single description of the narrow-market call: equal-weight is not just trailing, it is falling further behind cap-weight as the rally extends. Tech-versus-S&P widened to +0.094 from +0.063. Cyclicals just sign-flipped positive against defensives, +0.037 from -0.003 — the first read of cyclical leadership in a month. Sector-RS dispersion compressed from +0.364 to +0.182 as more sectors crowded into the same range. Small-versus-large is barely above zero. The Leadership composite reads median because tech-versus-S&P and cyclical-rotation are doing the lifting; equal-weight failure is dragging.

The week's volume regime read like a flipbook. Monday churning, Tuesday and Wednesday accumulation, Thursday neutral, Friday back to churning. No persistent character — five sessions, five different (or barely similar) volume signatures. Friday's tape pushed 100 names through climactic-volume and 100 through heavy-buying clusters at once, with 28 quiet-contraction setups building underneath. Heavy two-way flow without directional conviction. Then the calendar takes over. CPI hits Tuesday at 8:30 ET, PPI Wednesday, Retail Sales and Unemployment Claims Thursday, Industrial Production Friday — four high-importance releases inside the same week (CPI, Retail Sales, Claims, Industrial Production), with PPI as the medium-importance bookend on Wednesday. The March-31 FTD enters its final three trading days of validity through the same window, which means the 30-day uptrend confirmation either gets reaffirmed by an extension to new highs or expires with the regime reading 'extended' rather than 'confirmed.' With HY spreads at the 18th percentile and the Fed already deep into its cutting cycle, an upside surprise on inflation is the most asymmetric risk on the calendar.

Fed funds at 3.63% sits at the 0th percentile of our two-year window — the Fed has been cutting through every day we have data for. HY credit spreads at 2.79% sits at the 18th percentile, compressed and tight. The 10y-2y curve has un-inverted to a normal +48 basis points. VIX at 17 is dead-median. Each, alone, is constructive. Together they are why the regime has not broken even as the participation read concentrates and the composite flatlines.

HY spreads at the 18th percentile is the data point with the most asymmetric downside on the dashboard. There is more room for spreads to widen than to tighten from here. We do not predict a widening; we just note that, when it comes, it tends to come fast and the rest of the dashboard tends to follow. With four high-importance macro releases inside the next four trading days, the test of whether HY can hold the 18th percentile is more imminent than usual.

1. 01CPI Tuesday upside surprise — consensus prints land at 8:30 ET. The dashboard's HY-spread compression (18th percentile) and the 0th-percentile Fed funds reading both price the soft-landing path. A hot CPI is the cleanest single data point that would force a re-rating of every macro input on the dashboard at once.
2. 02equal-vs-cap-weight reclaims 0 — currently at -0.063 and worsening week-over-week (was -0.038). A flip back above zero is the first technical signal that the rally is broadening rather than narrowing. Until then, the 'narrow market' framing applies.
3. 03Distribution days ≥ 5 in the past 25 sessions. We are at 4 — same count as last week. A fifth or sixth before the FTD's 30-day validity expires would cancel the March-31 confirmation under classical CANSLIM rules.
4. 04Semiconductors out of top 3 on the 1-month board would invalidate the leadership thesis. Chips currently sits at #1 on the 1-month and 3-month boards and has held 1m #1 for thirteen sessions, even as it slipped to #5 on the 1-week board. If the longer-horizon leadership cracks, the entire industry stack has to reorganize.