Up, up, and away! Let’s take a fresh look at the big indexes out there.

The Dow Jones Composite, as is the habit of so many assets lately, hit yet another lifetime high. That wedge has tidily confined prices for over a year now.

The Nasdaq Composite isn’t quite in lifetime high territory quite yet. It wouldn’t take much to do so, particularly with a tidal wave of earnings coming from huge tech firms next week and, even moreso, the week after.

The more narrow Nasdaq 100 did, however, reach a lifetime high.

There are those two words again – – Lifetime High – – for the S&P 100. Optimism abounds!

Small caps, however, are still being left out in the cold (relatively speaking). This has been meandering for months now, with no clear direction and certainly no gusto, either bullish or bearish.

As you know, the H&S on the semiconductors got wrecked a couple of weeks ago, although it is still beneath its broken uptrend.

The charts above are pretty much just the past year or two, but I’ve deliberately selected a much longer period of the Dow Utilities, below, to illustrate what might be an important shift in trend.

Volatility, naturally, has been getting the life strangled out of it for many months, as we sink directly into the mid-teens.

Lastly, the final bastion of bearish possibilities – – the last ursine creature standing – – is the oil sector.