A technical warning signal emerged on the New York Stock Exchange in February that has preceded major market corrections in the past. This is behind the so-called Hindenburg Omen.
• Three Hindenburg Omen signals occurred within six trading days on the NYSE in early February 2026
• According to an expert, there have been a total of eight Hindenburg signals over the past six months
• The Hindenburg Omen was developed in the 1990s by US analyst Jim Miekka as a technical warning signal
What’s behind the Hindenburg Omen
The Hindenburg Omen is a technical indicator developed in the 1990s by US analyst Jim Miekka. The name goes back to the disaster of the German airship Hindenburg in 1937 and is intended to illustrate the potentially destructive power of the signal. The basic idea is simple: In a healthy uptrend, significantly more stocks should make new 52-week highs than new 52-week lows. However, if both occur at the same time in unusually high numbers, this indicates a split in the market.
Specifically, for a Hindenburg omen, several conditions must be met at the same time: Both the number of new highs and new lows on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) must exceed a threshold of 2.8 percent of all rising and falling stocks. In addition, the overall market must be in an upward trend. This was stated by Tom McClellan, editor of the McClellan Market Report, in an analysis dated February 5, 2026, citing the criteria that Miekka shared with analyst Greg Morris for his 2006 book “The Complete Guide To Market Breadth Indicators.” As an additional condition, McClellan uses the so-called McClellan oscillator, a measure of market breadth that must be negative for a Hindenburg omen.
Three signals in six trading days
At the beginning of February 2026, the Hindenburg Omen was triggered again, several times in quick succession. As McClellan writes in his February 5, 2026 analysis, three Hindenburg signals occurred within just six trading days. A fourth signal on February 4, 2026 narrowly failed because the McClellan Oscillator was minimally positive that day. The contrast is remarkable: on the same February 4th, the NYSE’s daily advance-decline line reached a new all-time high, which actually indicates abundant liquidity in the market. According to McClellan, the fact that another Hindenburg omen was triggered a day later shows that the market has serious problems despite this seemingly abundant liquidity.
As a report from MarketWatch on February 6, 2026 shows, there are now eight Hindenburg signals on the NYSE over a six-month period. This includes an earlier cluster of five signals between October 29th and November 13th, 2025, which the market initially survived without major disruptions. McClellan already classified the accumulation in an interview with TheStreet: If you look back over the past four decades and look at every obvious major market peak, you will find the Hindenburg omen in all of them. The more of these signals occur, the more important the warning becomes.
Warning, but no guarantee
The hit rate of the Hindenburg Omen is the subject of ongoing debate. Depending on the calculation method and time period, it is estimated to be around 20 to 25 percent, meaning that the majority of signals are false alarms. McClellan himself puts it this way in his analysis from February 5, 2026: A Hindenburg omen or a cluster of them is a warning, but not a guarantee of trouble. It simply says: “Increase attention.”
The decisive factor seems to be less the individual signal than the accumulation over a short period of time. Historically, most major market declines have actually been preceded by clusters of Hindenburg signals: one such cluster occurred before the bear market of 2022. At the end of 2024, shortly after the US presidential election, another cluster appeared, which was followed by a sharp drop in prices due to customs concerns surrounding US President Trump. At the same time, there are counter-examples: In 2013, ten signals appeared without the upward trend ending. McClellan attributes this to the fact that the US Federal Reserve was able to cover up many problems with its third bond purchase program (QE3). The Fed is currently running another such program with QE5, albeit on a smaller scale than in previous phases. It is therefore possible that the Fed will cover up the problems this time too.
What the current cluster actually means for investors remains an open question. The signals indicate that there is increasing divergence beneath the surface of the major indices: While some stocks continue to chase records, more and more stocks are coming under pressure at the same time. Whether this results in a broader correction or the market ignores the warning signals again depends on factors that the indicator alone cannot capture. McClellan summed it up in his November 2025 TheStreet interview: It’s not necessarily the time to sell everything and retreat to a bunker, but it is the time to be smart about it and look for further confirmatory signals.
D. Maier / editorial team finanzen.net
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