Despite getting lucky with this throwaway line late in the trading day on April 29:
That being said, we'll probably be up on Monday.
(Friday was the last trading day of the month, any position-squaring was being done as I typed, flip coin vigorously, et voilà)
We are no longer in a bull market. Here's a threefer. First up, David Goldman at Asia Times with the headliner, April 30:
End of Fed ease and looming recession spook US stocks
America’s giant tech monopolies puffed the capitalization of America’s stock market to dreamland proportions, and are waking up with a hangover as the era of easy money crashes to an end.
Federal Reserve largesse drove equity valuations in the form of falling real interest rates, which pushed investment flows out of bonds into stocks. The ensuing inflation forced the Fed to tighten, and toppled the tumescent stock market.
The NASDAQ 100 as of the April 29 close had lost more than 22% since Dec. 28, when I asked, “Can tech stocks survive Fed tapering?” I warned that tech stocks
earn only 0.7% of the S&P 500’s total revenue, but account for 12.2% of its market capitalization. This remarkable divergence of valuation might be the biggest bubble in market history: As the ‘real’ or inflation-indexed yield of US Treasury securities fell into deeply negative territory, the price of tech stocks rose in a nearly perfect straight line. Investors are buying tech stocks the way they used to buy utilities, as a source of monopoly income streams whose value depends on the return to the risk-free alternative, in this case real Treasury yield
The tech complex is going down the way it came, tracking the real Treasury yield almost tick for tick.
During 2021, money illusion ran wild as $6 trillion of federal stimulus pushed up GDP growth – but pushed up inflation even faster. Input costs outran even Amazon’s ability to raise prices, and the market-leading retail-and-computing giant registered its first loss in seven years during the first quarter. Amazon led the S&P 100 down with a 14% daily decline on April 29...
....MUCH MORE
Next up Tim Knight at Slope of Hope with the Nasdaq 100 chart (NDX):
Uh oh.
We've examined the pattern on the right side of the chart in a half-dozen different stocks and indices e.g. November 2021's "Chartology: Remember The Chart Pattern That Preceded The Drop In Beyond Meat? (IWM; BYND)".
And finally, a reminder, from December 2021:
Lest we forget, over five trading days in April 2000 the Nasdaq dropped 25%
Stocks can go up in bear markets, but: to quote sports writer Hugh E. Keough riffing off the Bible:
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
Try to shade the odds in your favor, even with something as simple as the coin flip.Next up: how to beat ten-year-olds at Monopoly using the old dice tricks, the whip shot and the drop shot.
