Good morning, everyone. The market got deeply red last night, but I’m afraid as of this moment it has flipped green in a few cases. By and large, equity futures are unchanged before the opening bell, with the /RTY grinding away pointlessly since Friday’s afternoon session.
A brighter spot for me has been Bitcoin, which continues to break down nicely. As of this composition, /BTC futures are down a full 2%, compared to the /ES, which is unchanged.
Friday was interesting inasmuch as we finally stopped the daily habit of lifetime highs. We’ll soon see if this was just a brief “pause that refreshes” or an actual inflection point. At last week’s end, the NASDAQ Composite undid the gains from Wednesday and Thursday.
The NASDAQ 100 pulled the same stunt (and let’s all keep in mind the big event this week is NVDA earnings on Wednesday after the close).
The Dow Industrials has been the only big index NOT making lifetime highs. Its own record was set back on February 10th. For perspective, Pam Bondi was still the AG at the time, which is why it feels like about fifty-seven years ago.
Last Wednesday and Friday “flanked” the price bar of Thursday on the S&P 500, and it was the first decent down day we had witnessed since this entire mega-rally began late in March.
My anchor position continues to be bonds, whose tumble on Friday was the driving reason behind any equity weakness.
The VIX seems to have been beaten down to a decent base. With Iran in a perpetual state of “in two weeks we’ll have a deal, once we work out the final details“, the market seems to have embraced a collective psychopathy in which we pretend everything’s going to work out just dandy. It’s always two weeks more, isn’t it?
In the time it took me to write this post, equity futures went from all red to all green (ostensibly because of some lifting of oil sanctions during the interminable negotiations).
Whatever.
I’m keeping my eyes on the big trends and not the band-aids being trumpeted from day to day.
