Pull the trigger with confidence.

Starting right after the November 2024 elections, the SP500 was doing better than average.  I wrote here back on Dec. 5, 2024 about the differences in stock market behavior between having an incumbent party president (or replacement) winning versus a new challenger.  Usually the victory of a new challenger candidate means he gets to serve in what is counted as his first term.  President Trump's victory is unusual in that he was the challenger to the incumbent party candidate (VP Harrris), but... Read More

Lots of people who trade or invest in the stock market like to look at the VIX Index, and there are hundreds of ways to analyze it with Bollinger Bands, moving averages, standard deviation, and other methods of slicing and dicing its messages.  This week's chart shows a way to compare the spot VIX Index to the pricing of the VIX futures contracts.

The VIX Index is based on the pricing of SP500 Index options.  When risks go up, the price premiums on those options goes up, much like the way... Read More

The total numbers of issues traded on both the NYSE and Nasdaq peaked with the stock market's peak at the end of 2021, and these numbers fell all during the bear market of 2022.  But then even though stock prices started turning up again in late 2022, the total numbers of stocks traded have continued to fall.  There are interesting reasons for that, which I will get to below.  But I should also note that in late 2024 we started seeing a brief swoop upward in Nasdaq issues traded.  That swoop... Read More

Most people think of "market breadth" as looking at Advances minus Declines.  But there are lots of ways to portray the behavior of a large group of stocks.  This week's chart looks at a rather unique one I created several years ago.

The Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX) made a new all-time closing high on Feb. 19, 2025.  And before that had happened, there was already a new high in QQEW, the equal-weighted ETF tracking the stocks in the NDX.  But curiously, the average drawdown among NDX component... Read More

I have written here twice before about the pretty amazing resemblance of the stock market in late 2024 to that of late 1980.  Those earlier stories are linked below.

It was a really fun analog while it lasted, but now it is time to close the book on that story.  We are not repeating the stock market of early 1981, just after President Reagan was inaugurated.  This breakup of correlation happens to all analogs eventually, and in my personal experience they usually fail right at the moment... Read More

Fear not the end of Reverse Repos.  The Fed can always go back to doing outright repurchase agreements.

A lot of analysts have noted that the size of the Fed's book in Reverse Repurchase Agreements (RRPs) has gotten really small lately.  The NY Fed reports its level daily via the St. Louis Fed's great FRED web site, at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/RRPONTSYD.  Those data are what I show in the chart above, with a couple of adjustments.  The first is that I invert the scaling, so the... Read More

There are certain relationships which work "normally" most of the time, and when they are working that way it is not very remarkable.  But when the normal relationship breaks down and starts acting differently, that gets our attention.

This week's chart shows us that the numbers of Nasdaq stocks making 52-week New Lows has been ramping up higher recently.  That is not the normal thing to see while prices are continuing to push to higher highs.  The normal relationship is that when prices... Read More