Published April 25, 2025
Stocks are looking to bounce back from a horrid beginning of April. The S&P 500 has rallied back to the “scene of the crime” where it broke down decisively at 550-560. Is there enough momentum to push through the resistance AND above the 200-day (40-week) moving average at 570? That’s what technical market analysts are looking for. (more…)
Published April 18, 2025
Below, we provide an excerpt of Blake Millard’s work discussing the impact of spikes in volatility. The market recently had a major spike with volatility remaining very elevated. What happens next historically? (more…)
Published April 11, 2025
Most commentators talk about a bear market as being a 20% decline from the market’s peak. While that short-hand is an easy measure, it doesn’t accurately describe the features that define a true bear market.
The bear market behaves in a certain way that is clearly different from normal. The past week has given us textbook bear market behavior. (more…)
Published April 4, 2025
The market turbulence reached a higher gear this week. Our friends at Delta Research provide an overview of the market inputs below:
“Since the presidential election, there has been a whirlwind of U.S. government policy changes. Rapid change creates investor uncertainty. The chart below shows how economic policy uncertainty recently reached the third highest level in the past 40 years. (more…)
Published March 28, 2025
As Delta Research outlines below, whether the recent struggles in the stock market are just a typical pullback or something larger rests with what ultimately happens to the economy. The widely-followed GDPNow economic forecast shows the economy shrinking in the first quarter. The question is whether that weakness will continue into the middle part of the year. (more…)
Published March 21, 2025
Stocks are attempting to rebound from a very difficult four-week period that has pushed the market indexes into a full-blown correction. How long and how deep the correction is the question. For now, we are seeing the market attempt an oversold bounce. (more…)
Published March 7, 2025
For much of the past four years investors have focused on inflation and the Federal Reserve’s fight against it. While the Fed only controls the very short-term interest rate, their words about potential future Fed moves affect interest rates much further out in time.
In December, the Fed surprised investors by pulling back on expectations for coming interest rate cuts. Inflation has stabilized albeit at levels that might be higher than the Fed would like. But over the past two weeks, interest rates have suddenly fallen sharply, appearing to diverge from the Fed-driven path. (more…)
Published 28 February, 2025
This week we start with a quick note about the sources of our weekly content since some of you have asked. We are trend-following mechanical/quantitative model investors. Since we are focused on technical analysis and the data behind the market, we often turn to other experts for analysis of the fundamentals of the economy, business, and markets. With few exceptions, those experts are money managers in charge of billions of dollars of assets, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, et al. These are the types of folks who move markets. As a result, we take their views seriously and strive to present them without edit. (more…)
Published February 21, 2025
Thus far in 2025, investors have wrestled with a blizzard of information as the new presidential administration takes control and outlines their policy priorities. One month into the Trump Administration, let’s see how markets have responded. (more…)
