Majority of stocks idling after nice run to record
(These are the market notes on today’s action by Mike Santoli, CNBC’s senior markets xommentator. See today’s video update from Mike above.) The majority of the market is idling after a nice run to record highs and ahead of a Fed decision, while some idiosyncratic flows goose the mega-tech stocks and the S & P 500 with them. As noted repeatedly, the market is pretty locked into the bulls’ preferred view that the Fed will be cutting interest rates starting Wednesday into a reasonably firm economy, with stocks at highs, credit spreads vanishingly tight, corporate balance sheets flush, an AI capex boom that keeps booming and even some signs of reacceleration in economic growth. This helps explain the S & P 500 churning to records without sustaining even a 3% pullback since May, placing valuations at cycle highs, while also creating room for disappointment or fatigue even if the Fed delivers as hoped . Alphabet accelerating, possibly entering short-term blowoff mode, on kind analyst words and a radically improved public perception of the company’s positioning in an AI-centric world. The stock is still benefiting from having been dismissed and cheapened by prior fears of its search franchise being disrupted. The stock has gone from under 16-times expected earnings to nearly 24x, and still is a bit less expensive than Meta Platforms . Elon Musk picking up $1 billion worth of Tesla shares has torqued that already tightly geared stock higher, a self-fulfilling trick of Musk spending a little money to have even more added to his net worth in response. The Tesla chart is now broadly beloved and respected as it gathers upside momentum (though of course Musk selling the stock throughout 2022 to fund his Twitter purchase, mostly at lower prices than he just bought, was a move better faded than followed). Even within the Nasdaq-100 , the biggest of the big have diverged upward from the pack. Here’s the NDX vs. the equally weighted version of the index. Some other signs of waning internal energy (percentage of stocks above the 200-day average, etc) which has some on watch for a soft patch in the indexes. Still a sturdy trend but with a few blemishes. Market breadth is blah, the equal-weight S & P 500 flattish , volumes are subdued, recent winners such as homebuilders easing back. And yet t he CBOE Volatility Index is perky , up almost a point at close to 16. Some impulse to hedge ahead of the Fed decision, which BofA technical strategist Paul Ciana notes coincides this year with the start of the often bumpy final 10 days of September, which qualifies as the weakest last 10 days of any month. For what that’s worth. Landmark alert: The S & P 500 is trading above 6600. The intraday low at the bottom of the Great Financial Crisis bear market was, famously, 666. So the index is on the verge of a ten-bagger over 16 ½ years. That’s a near-15% annualized return since then, and 16.9%/year including dividends. Not a bad reward for buying when the world looked bleakest.
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