Trend and momentum: which markets are rising, and which are leading

Trend asks whether a market is rising; momentum asks whether it is rising faster than the others. Both look back over the same horizons: 1, 3, 6 and 12 months. Every market is measured on its return above a liquid fund (the 91-day T-bill), so an index that only keeps pace with cash is not trending.

The trend score is the share of 24 signals that point up: four ways of asking whether a price is trending (above where it was, above its average, a short average above a long one, in the top half of its range), each at six horizons from one month to a year. 100 means all agree it is rising; 0 that all agree it is falling.

Uptrend and downtrend. Read once a week, a market enters an uptrend when its score reaches 70 (17 of 24 signals up) and stays in it until the score falls to 30 or below, when it enters a downtrend. "Uptrend since March 2026" means the score first reached 70 in March and has not fallen to 30 since. The gap between the two lines keeps a market from flipping every other week.

Momentum rank orders every market by its return above cash over 1, 3, 6 and 12 months against all the others, and averages the four. 100 is the strongest. It is relative: in a falling market the leaders may still be falling, only less.

The two rules readers know best are shown in words: the 10-month average ("holding since April 2026" when the month-end price is above it, "in cash since…" when below) and the 200-day average. They were tested on seven markets before any result was seen; on the others they describe the trend and are not a test.

Describing is not forecasting. In our pre-registered tests no trend or momentum rule on indices beat buying and holding by more than luck would explain, and after tax every rule trailed on the large-cap indices. What the rules did reliably was cut the worst falls. What the tests found. Many indices are back-calculated by NSE before their launch; their pages say so and draw that history lighter.