FYI: he one surviving bear had a fantastic week – granted 3 of his 4 limbs have been severed so fantastic is relative. You will have heard a lot of clucking about “reasons” for the selloff this past week. These are just random prose to explain a very overheated market that was long overdue for a correction of any sort. The major indexes were on pace for 70-80-90% gains based on the first 3 weeks of the year…. that’s not sustainable. We’ve been setting all sorts of records of days/weeks/months without a pullback of any sort. So here is a pullback. The words needed to explain it are just excess.
Pullbacks for months on end have been incredibly minor – finding even a day of >0.30% down was difficult to find. This week three different days actually surpassed <0.5% down. Which again is a pretty normal number, that this market has been unable to accomplish much at all for a year. Now the only question is can we get a more serious correction or was this the one week down before the Trump market turns around and takes the last remaining limb of the last bear?
By the way January 2018 ended as the best monthly returns since March 2016 (PANIC!) The S&P 500 gained 5.6% for the month – that includes the losses of Monday and Tuesday. That would annualize to 67.2%. The NASDAQ rose 7.4% for the month; that’s a cool 88.8% return annualized. So again even with the selling Monday and Tuesday, indexes were on pace for 70-90% returns.
For the week the S&P 500 fell 3.9% and NASDAQ 2.5%.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.stocktrader.com/2018/02/04/weekly-market-recap-feb-4-2017/
