This week's pause aside, the market surge over the last five weeks has enabled the Dow and the S&P to shoot back to near breakeven for 2016. The Dow, in fact, is now slightly positive on the year.
It's a different story for small caps and the NASDAQ however as those indexes remain down more than 4% so far for the year. Granted, they also had fallen the most (15%) from Jan. 1 through the February lows.
Taking a look at sector performance, utilities remain the clear leader of the pack while healthcare and financials are experiencing rather dramatic underperformance.
Some charts and links from the week that was...
Chris, from Ciovacco Capital, in a highly comprehensive video update notes that global stocks continue to make a series of lower highs and lower lows and reside firmly in a downtrend.
Chris also notes that the FTSE All World Stock Index has gone exactly nowhere in the last two years.
Steve Deppe of Nerad & Deppe Wealth Management had a fantastic piece on the S&P 500 and the "squeeze" that's underway with its Bollinger Bands. In the past, this has been a sign of a big move being in the offing.
Mohamed El-Erian has some helpful commentary on the current wide and volatile trading range.
And we took a look at what it has meant when the NASDAQ has been up 5 days in a row. A streak it notched this week. We also addressed what's happened after the S&P has recorded 5 straight weeks of gains.
We hope you had a great holiday weekend and we'll see you this week.
