Stocks Are on Fire

For just the third time in the last decade, the S&P 500 has been higher for eight consecutive weeks. This is the 19th time it happened since 1950.

With a 15.5% gain since the last week in October, it’s the 3rd strongest 8-win streak for the S&P 500. Not bad. Not bad at all.

It’s weird to say that it’s been a tough year, considering the S&P 500 is 26% and the Nasdaq-100 is up 54%. And while tough may not be the right way to describe the market in 2024, it certainly hasn’t been easy.

There was good reason to be concerned coming into the year. Inflation was running at over 6%. The fed had already hiked seven times for a total of 425 basis points. And with that, stocks had gotten killed.

It’s easy to forget, now that the Q’s are up 54% on the year, but coming into 2023, Meta was in a 68% drawdown. Nvidia and Amazon were both off 55%. Alphabet was 41% below its high. And then in the first quarter, we had the regional bank crisis. And then we had to worry about about what impacts that might have on credit availability. Then we had the usual nonsense with the debt-ceiling “crisis.” All the while, we had been bracing for the impact of a recession that never came.

And inside of the stock market, all year we had people talking about how all of the gains were coming from the top 7 stocks, implying that the rally was somehow artificial and due to fizzle out. And it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable observation. When we had a swift 10% correction in October in the S&P 500, the equal-weight version of the index was down 5% on the year with just two months to go.

And then it happened. Stocks stopped going down and now they won’t stop going up. Eight weeks in a row of gains.

It’s been a hell of a year for the stock market, but don’t let anybody tell you that it’s been easy for investors. It was anything but.