Stocks test 5% pullback before steadying
(These are the market notes on today’s action by Mike Santoli, CNBC’s Senior Markets Commentator. See today’s video update from Mike above.) Was that the cleansing flush the market needed? An early stampede out of the S & P 500 growth-stock heavyweights cracked the index below its November low and brought it within sight of a more widely watched level at the bottom of a two-month range (the 6550 area noted here Monday) before a strong upside reversal led by the very groups that had been driving the downside for weeks. One of the cautious observations in recent weeks has been that the market was due for a pullback of at least 5% from a high, something that hadn’t happened since April for one of the half-dozen longest such streaks in recent decades. Tuesday morning, the index shuttled to a 5% decline off the Oct. 29 intraday record high — almost to the micro-tick — before the bounce. The market sometimes obeys the “first in, first out” rule of market corrections. In the current case, small-caps, cryptocurrencies, homebuilders and other consumer-sensitive groups had been struggling for weeks, leading to a deeply bifurcated market. These are the segments that outperformed or were even up Tuesday. We had value over growth, small over large. Banks have hung in a bit better and today were green. Just a mechanical rotation and a flurry of short-covering, or a sign that the market is completing a proper reset of prices, valuations and expectations to open the way for some relief into Thanksgiving week? None of the significant issues the market has been grappling with have been settled, exactly, but sometimes prices alone can drain the urgency from controversy. Sure, there remains a lot of disagreement over the sustainability and wisdom of the headlong AI-infrastructure investment binge. But with Nvidia having shed close to $600 billion in market value in three weeks, at least some of the skeptical case is registering in the stock. Perhaps such a drop has rebuilt investors’ capacity for pleasant surprise. The Nasdaq-100 checked back to levels first seen in the market liftoff from the September Fed meeting on the 17th, when the central bank resumed cutting rates. We went from the consensus being convinced there would be a string of rate cuts into a sturdy economy to now worrying the Fed wants to hold tight next month even as consumer activity has sputtered and job growth stalled. Most likely the market would need reassurance on either further Fed cuts or the resilience of the economy before this bounce ushered in a full and forceful recovery. But the market has been busy trying to price it all in: The equal-weight consumer-discretionary ETF had a stiff 10% correction and gave up its gains for the year before holding firm Tuesday. Home Depot remains under pressure, off 4%, following reduced earnings guidance, though the stock is up almost 1% from today’s low and the broad homebuilder ETF is around flat after an awful run. Elsewhere among the market’s problem children, Bitcoin has steadied, tentatively, near $93,000 after a whoosh below $90,000 earlier. Not a macro message exactly, but a pause in the selloff at least suggests there’s no intensifying portfolio stress driving forced selling. Market breadth turned positive on the day on both major exchanges, defensive sectors plugged the gap to a degree, and short-term signs of negative sentiment (put buying, near-term VIX futures trading at a premium) started to flash. Nothing decisive and the broad indexes never quite got glaringly oversold, but the market with this comeback is making a bid that we reached an “Enough for now” moment after the biggest gut check in months and with aggressive positioning clipped back 24 hours ahead of Nvidia’s moment of truth.
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