Apple saved the day, and the market followed along. I mentioned $AAPL in today's Morning Briefing, noting that if it gets above 146.60 it can head to 149.
The Chart: The S&P 500 fell 0.7% on Wednesday, despite a majority of the stocks in the index advancing on the day. Thursday was similar, with the index falling 0.6% but again more stocks were up than down.
By The Numbers: Going back to 1998, there have been 276 single day instances of the index declining on days when more stocks were up than down. That is less than 5% of the time. We’ve seen it for two days in a row only 25 times. 2022 is the first year since 2017 that we have had two in a row more than once in a single year. We’ve only seen three for three (three consecutive index-level declines accompanied by more stocks rising than falling) three times since 1998, with the most recent coming more than twenty years ago.
"Old Economy" stocks are drawing our attention again.
Our Head Technical Analyst Steve Strazza says: "these old economy stocks are all beating earnings and taking leadership roles" and he cites companies like Caterpillar $CAT, Deere $DE, as well as energies, homebuilders, and transportation stocks.
Today's trade is an expression of the continuation of this theme, and our target stock is offering us a nice pullback to enter into.
The Twitter-and-Elon Musk saga has finally come to an end, as the eccentric billionaire has completed a $44 billion acquisition of the struggling social media company.
The stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange today.
How great it is that we can change our minds and take decisive action immediately?
As traders in the financial markets, if our spidey senses detect that something is amiss or conditions have changed, we can often liquidate our positions and head safely into cash with just a few keystrokes on our computer. Depending on the size of our positions, we can be completely in cash within minutes, maybe even seconds!
You can’t do that with Real Estate.
You certainly can’t do that with Private Equity investments.
You definitely can’t do that with a small business.
All of those investments are fine for their own reasons. But they don’t offer us the opportunity to immediately exit if we change our minds.
Of course, just because we can change our minds on a dime doesn’t mean we always should. If we’re wishy-washy and trading without a plan, it becomes incredibly easy to overtrade and drive our commission bills and nerves through the roof. While this might make us popular at our broker’s office, our accountants will unlikely be pleased.
There are stocks going up and there are stocks going down.
I'm old enough to remember when we would all call that normal.
The going up category just got longer recently. Remember Energy had been the only Sector Index above its 200 day moving average.
Healthcare is now also on that list.
Industrials and Consumer Staples are the next closest ones.
This morning we talked about how poorly the Tech heavy Emerging Markets were doing vs those like Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, that have a much different composition.
Another big loser driving headlines is in Large-cap Growth. Stocks like Google and Facebook got crushed after earnings. And now Amazon is joining that list after the bell Thursday.
But that's specifically Large-cap Growth.
Small-cap Growth, on the other hand, is holding up way better.
You can see here how Small-cap Growth is hitting the highest levels of the year relative to Large-cap Growth:
