The catalyst all along was the U.S. Dollar.

During this US Dollar decline over the past couple quarters, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq100 are each up over 15%.

These tremendous gains for stocks started once the journalists all agreed on how strong the Dollar was at the time.

You can see those implications here.

The morning of Good Friday I popped into Fox Business to chat about markets with Maria Bartiromo.

The last time I was on with her, back in October, we discussed how stocks were still in the early stages of a new bull market.

Now that we've seen the S&P500 rally 15% with the Nasdaq100 up 22%, people are starting to believe.

It's been broad based appreciation in stock prices since that October morning.

Every US Sector is positive and many are up over 20%, just since October alone. The numbers are even better when you anchor back to when the new 52-week lows list peaked in June.

Historically, during bull markets you see more and more stocks going up and making new highs. In bull markets you see more sectors participating to the upside and more countries around the world breaking out.

This is exactly what's been happening for about 10 months now.

All these uptrends you're seeing in most stocks is not a new phenomenon.

You're seeing the permabears pointing to the Equally-weighted S&P500 falling down towards new 52-week lows relative to the Market-cap weighted version.

You can see what's happening here:

The Nasdaq just went out last week at new 7-month highs.

Growth stocks are back.

But why?

Interest Rates are falling at a record pace.

And when you look at the intermarket relationships, it makes a lot of sense:

US interest rates have fallen to their lowest levels since Q3 last year.

And with falling rates has come a consistent bid into Technology and growth all year so far.

That has driven the Nasdaq100 to its highest weekly close in 7 months:

This is the video recording of the March 2023 Mid-month Conference Call.

Ever since the 2-year yield bottomed in Q1 of 2021 Technology stocks have struggled. Growth became the worst place to be.

It was NOT a coincidence that once those rates started to rise in early 2021, the Nasdaq New Highs list peaked, the Nasdaq Advance-Decline line peaked, all the ARK Funds peaked, Chinese internet peaked, Biotech peaked and everyone piled had into SPACs before they all came crashing down.

Because the 2-year yield was rising so fast, and the longer end of the curve couldn't keep up, we got the mother of all yield curve inversions.

The media loves to scare people with it because I think an inverted yield curve has predicted something like 50 of the last 8 recessions.

But now it's bon voyage yield curve inversion. Good riddance!

We're seeing the largest 5-day rate of change in the yield curve since the early 1980s:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our March Monthly Strategy Session on Monday night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

This is the video recording of our March 6th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

She was always the one.

All along it was the US dollar that was the best indicator.

Old reliable.

So why should we abandon it now?

Look at the US Dollar Index overlaid with the short ETF for the S&P500.

In other words, when the blue line goes up, that means stock market shorts are making money (along with rising dollars). But when the blue line falls, that means the shorts are losing and people who own stocks are the ones making money (with dollars falling):

It starts with credit.

Bottom line.

This isn't crypto where all these shitcoins can go to zero and it won't matter to anyone who matters.

These aren't marijuana stocks that are irrelevant to global asset allocation.

This is the bond market.

This is the biggest and baddest of them all.

We're talking about almost a $120 Trillion asset class.

It's just math: if there is real systemic risk in the equities market, you're going to see it in credit.

There's no way around it.

And so how are credit spreads doing?

As tight as they have been since last summer, and getting tighter:

This is the video recording of our February 6th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session