Just to be clear, as a few people have emailed me and asked about this (as what I posted here was also emailed to several people): please remember that the chart showing the usual lower boundary for a cyclical bull market is a weekly close chart and not a daily close chart. I sent an email yesterday partly because the S&P had made a daily close below the usual lower boundary for a cyclical bull market, and this suggests that there is a good chance that at some point in the next few months the S&P will make a weekly close below the boundary - but, yes, until there is a weekly close below the lower boundary (and not simply a daily close below it), the lower boundary has not actually been broken.
By the way, if the S&P does make a weekly close below the lower boundary, a secondary signal one might wish to monitor as even further confirmation of the need to completely be ready for a cyclical bear market (even if one may not be starting, and I gave a few reasons for why I have a hard time believing that one is starting in my last post) is if the S&P closes below its 20-month moving average at the end of this month. The following is a very brief excerpt of a research article from MarketTells.com completed several weeks back: Historically, crosses of the 20-bar average on the monthly S&P chart (84-bar on the weekly S&P chart) have proven to be more reliable than crosses of the 200-day average. Out of 24 signals since 1950, note that only one led to a meaningful loss when the signal was closed out, and even that was less than 10%. By comparison, there were fourteen signals that generated a profit of more than 10%.
And, for those who asked for the settings on the chart, they are attached. In these settings, the 40-week moving average represents the weekly version of the 200-day moving average, and the 84-week moving average represents the weekly version of the 20-month moving average (84 weeks * 5 days per week = 21 days * 20 months) .
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