The Friday snap.

The S&P added 0.2% across five sessions and looked, through Thursday, like more of the same. SPY closed 748.17 Thursday, a fresh 52-week high. The distribution day count had rolled down to one. The multi-week narrow-trend rally that the prior posts have been tracking was extending. Then Friday cut 1.20% off in a single tape — and not on a vacuum-volume drift. Across the broad-market universe, up-volume came in at 0.375× down-volume. The McClellan Oscillator fell from −18 a week ago to −84 today. Forty-seven names printed climactic-volume readings — extreme up- or down-volume capitulations on the day. The volume regime tag, which had read churning a week earlier, turned distribution.

It cost the dashboard eleven points of Stance on Friday alone — 65 Thursday to 54 Friday, leaving a ten-point net move on the week. The composite ended in the neutral band. Breadth fell eighteen points week-over-week. Trend fell fourteen, from 79 to 65. Leadership barely moved, because Leadership had been weak all month — 41 to 34. The 43-point pctile gap between Trend and Leadership that the prior post called out has closed to 32. It closed by Trend falling, not Leadership rising. That is the exact failure mode the narrow-rally setup carries: when the prop gets kicked, the floor has nothing to catch it on.

The composite is back in neutral on a one-day reset. The four subscores ranked by today's percentile: Trend 71st, Breadth 50th, Leadership 39th, Macro 19th. Macro rose this week, +5 to 58, on VIX continuing to roll off its earlier-month spike and HY spreads tightening further into the 10th percentile. Trend and Breadth dropped together on the Friday tape — Breadth from the 88th pctile a week ago to the 50th today, Trend from the 98th to the 71st. The one-day Trend decline is the steepest in the 90-day window. Leadership has been the flat line; it stayed flat. The dashboard's structural problem this month was never Trend. It was that Leadership had nothing under it.

The chart shows it cleanly. Trend (gold) climbed from the low-60s in early May to 82 by Thursday — then collapsed to 65 in one session, retracing the bulk of the prior two weeks' advance. Breadth (green) followed it down, 73 to 54. Leadership (orange) is the line that didn't participate in the recent rise: while Breadth and Trend climbed into the upper band through May, Leadership has been compressed in the 34-to-57 range for the past month, ending at 34 — the low of the 90-day window. Macro (grey) is the line that rose this week. Three subscores down hard or sideways; only Macro moved up — and Macro carries a 0.20 weight in the composite, tied with Leadership and below the 0.30 weights on Trend and Breadth.

We pull every prior session in our daily history whose five-vector reading sits within striking distance of today's. The closest match (2025-10-20) sits at distance 5.43, and all four neighbors sit inside distance 9 — a tight cluster by the standards of these weekly briefs. Forward returns charted below; the highlighted line is the nearest neighbor.

Three of four analogs are positive at +20 days. Three of four are positive at +60. The dispersion shows up at +5: three positive (+2.08, +2.22, +0.75) and one outlier negative — the 2025-11-12 anchor lost 3.04% across the first five sessions before recovering most of the way over the next sixty. That Nov-2025 reading is the cautionary template: a similar setup that paid for itself with a single-week air pocket before grinding back. The two 2023 anchors both delivered at d20 (+2.92 and +3.69) — one then resolved higher into d60, one chopped back to negative. The agreement across all four is that this configuration tends to chop, not crash. The dispersion at d5 is wide enough that the next five sessions are the resolution window, not the trend.

Tech held #1 with relative-strength 0.179, slipping from 0.186 a week ago — leadership intact, intensity easing. Energy held #2 and posted the largest one-week RS gain on the sector board, rising from 0.073 to 0.127. Industrials climbed one rank to #3 and Materials slipped one to #4. Staples climbed two ranks 9→7. Utilities went the other way, slipping two ranks 8→10. The bottom three are now Health Care (#9), Utilities (#10), and Financials (#11) — Financials has held last for the third straight week. Every sector outside Tech and Energy still prints negative RS. The shape of the rotation is XLK + XLE on top, everything else negative — the same two-positive configuration as last week, with Energy closing roughly half its RS gap with Tech.

On the 1-month board the top is still tech-heavy: Semiconductors #1, Pharmaceuticals #2, Electrical Equipment #3, Computer Hardware #4, Software #5, Healthcare Services #6. The longer-horizon ranking has not broken. The story is the gap between 1-month and 1-week ranks across the tech-and-pharma cohort. Semiconductors hold #1 on 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month — but read #5 on 1-week. Pharma reads #2 on 1-month and 3-month but only #21 on 1-week. Hardware reads #4 on 1-month and 6-month but #17 on 1-week. Software reads #5 on 1-month against #30 on 1-week. The cohort still owns the medium-term ranking; it has cooled on the one-week frame across four subgroups at once. What climbed into the 1-week top on the other side: Beer & Liquor moved to #1 from a 6-month rank of #22 — a 21-rank climb, the biggest mover on the heatmap. Healthcare Services climbed thirteen ranks to #4 (from 6m #17). Industry rotation toward defensives at the freshest horizon, against an intact medium-term tech-plus-pharma stack.

Top six on the leadership board, ranked by the multi-factor composite. The board turned over hard: TRT jumped 105 ranks to #1, with all three factors — trend smoothness, 52-week proximity, volume velocity — printing in the top decile of the eligible universe. BAND climbed two to #2, AGL held #3 unchanged, TH jumped 42 ranks to #4. AXTI fell three ranks to #5 — last week's top-of-board semiconductor demoted as the board reshuffled. KALV climbed seven to #6. Four of six (TRT, BAND, TH, KALV) print all three factors in the top decile of the eligible universe; the other two (AGL, AXTI) carry two top-decile factors with the third in the upper-mid range. Industry mix: special-industry machinery, software, healthcare services, lodging, semiconductors, pharma — heterogeneous, not concentrated like last week's three-of-six-semis read. On the separate stock_rs_1m leaderboard the churn was higher: three names entered the top-25 (ASBP, AIXI, PIII — PIII's tape on Friday was an extreme one-day outlier, +180% on volume, not organic accumulation), and five dropped out (CUE, CNSP, ELPW, BAND, DGXX).

The Leadership subscore reads 34, the 39th percentile, low end of the month-long range. Sub-signal decomposition tells the story. Equal-weight versus cap-weight deepened to −0.088 from −0.063 a week ago and −0.038 the week before — three consecutive weeks of equal-weight falling further behind cap-weight, with no flattening. Small-versus-large sign-flipped negative this week: +0.007 last week to −0.031 today. That is the first negative read on this signal across our recent weekly briefs — small caps actively underperforming, not just trailing. Cyclical-versus-defensive at +0.038 is essentially unchanged from last week's +0.037 — sector-level cyclicals still leading defensives by the same margin even as the industry board's 1-week leader is Beer & Liquor. QQQ-versus-SPY essentially unchanged at +0.095 (was +0.094). Sector-RS dispersion unchanged at +0.182. Three signals essentially flat; equal-vs-cap deepening for a third straight week; small-vs-large flipped negative for the first time across our recent weekly briefs.

The Friday tape was the regime event. Up-volume divided by down-volume across the broad-market universe came in at 0.375 — down-volume nearly three times up-volume, the kind of one-day breadth reading that usually accompanies a multi-day capitulation, not a single session. The McClellan Oscillator's flip from −18 to −84 in one week says the same thing: heavy one-day damage on a tape that had been balanced before. Forty-seven names printed climactic-volume readings — extreme up- or down-volume capitulations — against 100 in heavy-buying clusters and only 14 in quiet-contraction setups. Healthier tapes tilt the count toward quiet-contraction bases rather than climactic blow-offs; this mix tilts the other way. The calendar through next week is thin: only Thursday's jobless claims carries high importance through May 21. The catalyst stack lands the following Thursday, May 28 — GDP, PCE, and weekly claims on the same morning. That is the resolution window, not this week.

Fed funds at 3.63% sits at the 0th percentile of our daily history — the Fed has been cutting through every day we have data for. HY credit spreads tightened further to 2.76%, now the 10th percentile (was the 18th a week ago). The 10y-2y curve sits at +0.50pp, the 69th percentile, comfortably normalized. VIX at 17.26 (63rd) has rolled off its prior 33.62 spike across the past three weeks. Each individually is constructive. The Macro composite rose this week to 58, the only subscore that did. It is what is keeping the dashboard from cutting deeper after Friday's tape.

HY spreads at the 10th percentile, tightening into a week that ended with a distribution day, is the most asymmetric configuration on the dashboard. Spreads compress in good markets and widen in bad ones; they are at the kind of level where the next move is more likely to be wider than tighter. That widening, when it comes, has historically arrived faster than the equity dashboard catches up. Spreads did not widen this week — they tightened further. The gap between what credit is pricing (essentially no risk) and what equity volume did on Friday (heavy one-day distribution) is the kind of disagreement that resolves, and credit has been the one that ends up right more often than not.

1. 01Second distribution day inside five sessions — Friday's tape printed one fresh distribution day. A second within five sessions would be the multi-day capitulation pattern, not the single-day air pocket the analog set suggests. The DD count fell to 2 this week (from 4) because old DDs aged out of the 25-session window; classical-rule cancellation of the April-8 FTD triggers at a count of 5.
2. 02FTD validity expires on the third trading day this week. April-8 FTD has 3 trading days of its 30-day validity left. Without a new high by Wednesday's close or a fresh FTD re-trigger, the 30-trading-day uptrend confirmation window lapses and the rally is no longer marked as freshly confirmed under the classical CANSLIM rules.
3. 03equal-vs-cap-weight stops deepening — the signal sits at -0.088 today against -0.063 a week ago and -0.038 the week before. Three straight weeks of widening underperformance for the broad market versus mega-cap. A flattening would be the first sign that broad participation is starting to return; until then, the narrow-rally framing extends.
4. 04SPY closes below the 50-day moving average — currently 28 sessions above. The cushion is 7.3% — SPY at 739, 50dma near 688. A break would coincide with Trend dropping through the 50th percentile and the FTD's validity window almost certainly being exhausted. The earliest realistic test is the May 28 macro stack.