All parents these days want their kids to exhibit resilience against life’s challenges, yet they try to prevent the exact kinds of setbacks needed to produce this adaptive trait. It’s similar with investors, who in theory want their investments to withstand life’s inevitable stress events while bristling at what those downside tests reveal. The markets’ disquieting November – with stocks’ failure to draw strength from sturdy Nvidia results, their inability to disconnect from reeling bitcoin prices and their discomfort with a noncommittal Federal Reserve – is at a basic level (so far) merely a standard payback phase after an unusually long, calm ascent. The S & P 500 went up almost 40% over six months without even a 3% wobble, and since then has undergone waves of turbulence that undercut that multi-month uptrend and reflects a proper reassessment of AI momentum, underlying economic growth and the policy mix ahead. .SPX 6M mountain S & P 500, 6 months The way that “routine” pullbacks end is that enough market participants start to entertain the possibility that things are worse than routine and sell more aggressively and at lower prices than real-world conditions seem to warrant. Are we there yet? Is the market in the process of building a better, more-balanced bull while humbling the hubristic momentum traders? Among the pluses that have emerged from this S & P 500 switchback, the uncommon streaks are over: the index’s extended run above its 50-day moving average, the streak of positive Monday returns, the prolonged stretch without a 5% retreat. The good news is that the first break of such periods of persistent strength is usually not how bull markets end. The S & P 500 perhaps found support late last week at its 100-day average, less watched than the 50 and 200 but often useful. Even so, the Friday bounce helped by dovish messaging from New York Fed President John Williams failed even to get the S & P up to the high from Thursday morning, before that nasty post-Nvidia-earnings air pocket. John Kolovos, chief technical strategist at Macro Risk Advisors, concludes his weekly review like this: “This is an inflection point. The bigger trend is still constructive, but internal damage is legit, leadership is faltering, and we’re sitting on the most important support levels since the April bottom.” More broadly, “bottom-up and top-down trend work is still positive, the majority of our indicators are flashing oversold readings, and our sentiment work shows that folks are overly bearish here, which are conditions that point to a recovery attempt in the coming days.” Last week’s weakness slightly overshot the levels that were seen as a crucial floor of the fourth-quarter range, the October lows near 6550 of the S & P 500, but the benchmark did pop back above there by Friday’s finish. It’s striking how many of the “lunatic fringe” assets that went wild to the upside after Labor Day have retrenched toward late-summer levels: Shares of Robinhood , Palantir , Nvidia , the IPO-packed ETF First Trust US Equity Opportunities (FPX) . Bitcoin is inextricable from such moves. Crypto has revealed itself as a chaos agent across asset classes, driven in the absence of genuine fundamentals almost entirely by crowd sentiment, flows and leverage. BTC.CM= 6M mountain Bitcoin, 6 months Crypto partisans keep referring to the Oct. 10 collapse in bitcoin as a “liquidation event” as if this is some random act of nature rather than the inevitable result of too many leveraged accounts sinking quickly underwater on a relatively modest price drop and being forcibly sold out. The portfolio impairment means adjacent holdings – the kinds of stocks held in size by the types of people all-in on crypto – have suffered. Which is why equity traders have keyed off intraday moves in bitcoin as a sign of further portfolio stress, liquidity clogs and risk aversion. It’s a tricky input for long-term investors but it’s surely a good thing that this dynamic is more widely recognized. This applies more broadly now, in fact: Long-building imbalances are now being reckoned with as part of the daily argument over the likely future between buyers and sellers, which we call the financial markets. This is better than having those balances being ignored, though not the same as seeing them solved. The market discourse is now saturated with talk of the bifurcated “K-shaped” economy, the dominance of AI-infrastructure spending in the GDP-growth mix, the resulting hyper-concentration of equity market cap in Big Tech and retail-trader aggression contrasting with overall more muted investor risk attitudes. Alphabet taking over AI trade The AI theme is undergoing a fitful sorting by investors of potential winners and losers, the Street applying more stringent scrutiny of business models and capital structures. A true runaway bubble would be more indiscriminately generous than to haircut Meta Platforms’ market cap by 25% in a few months, for example. META 6M mountain Meta, 6 months Still, this makes for a wide-swinging range of perceived potential outcomes measured in trillions of dollars. Alphabet’s ascendance is a stark reflection of this process, once considered the leader with the most to lose in an AI world, the company is now being given credit for its advantages in building and deploying AI models – all while attracting investor dollars as a hiding place from the capital-hungry OpenAI web of relationships. The shares of Google’s parent have now outperformed Meta’s by more than 50 percentage points this year and last week Alphabet’s market cap nosed above Microsoft’s. A world in which Alphabet is considered to hold pole position is uncomfortable for the rest of the AI food chain: A self-financed incumbent preserving its position and making AI services seem more a continuing evolution than an abrupt revolution lowers the odds of success for upstarts and AI maximalists. Yet, as the dramatic mood shift in Alphabet’s favor itself has shown, such assessments can and will be challenged and rethought with little notice. Meantime, as such arguments rage and stock prices come off the boil, the upside surprise in tech earnings and the rolling-forward of the forecast window have reduced the Nasdaq 100’s price/earnings ratio by two full points this month, to 26.4-times the next 12 months’ estimates. Not cheap but less than a point above the average for the current three-year AI-bull-market cycle. Fed to the rescue? The rethink over the AI story is coinciding with an unusually pointed and public debate over whether the Federal Reserve will, and should, trim short-term rates again in December. The broadening unease with recent hawkish messaging by several Fed voices has summoned some memories of late-2018, when the market decided the Fed was too tight in the face of tariff pressures and decelerating job growth and stocks cascaded lower by nearly 20% until Chair Jay Powell messaged a dovish pivot. It’s not ideal for Wall Street to remain in suspense on the Fed’s next move less than three weeks ahead of the decision, with only this week open to further rhetorical input before the pre-meeting speech blackout period starts. Still, unlike in late 2018, the Fed’s last move was a cut and so will its next one, almost certainly, whatever the timing. Meantime, the market can defer its rate-cut expectation into January while the clock ticks toward a new and surely more dovish Fed Chair arriving in the spring. For now, the market is staggered but standing, the median S & P 500 stock down 16% from its peak, the tactical trading cues paramount in a catalyst-scarce, holiday-interrupted tape. Credit markets are noticing the worry around data-center debt issuance but are not broadly showing undue stress. The S & P 500 Volatility Index closing Friday near 24 shows traders on medium-high alert and needing bitcoin to get some traction for the tape to settle. Healthcare and other more stable groups have tried to step in to offset the weakness in momentum-propelled growth sectors, but as often observed here a “broader” market isn’t always a safer or more rewarding one. The onus is now on the bulls to show some resilience against an imperfect and ambiguous fundamental backdrop – but at least there’s now broad recognition of the imperfection and ambiguity that are always there and sometimes ignored.
