Momentum Monday - Mood Still Grumpy...Prices Continue To Go Up as Big Tech Companies Show Their Cash Flow Power

Another new all-time high for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 despite of the Fed’s comments on interest rates. Powell said that they will very likely wait until May before they cut rates to make sure that high inflation won’t come back. The market initially sold off but quickly bounced and made new highs after strong earnings from Meta and Amazon. The economy is strong, the job market is strong, inflation is slowing down, companies’ earnings are beating estimates, there are 6 trillion dollars in money market funds, and it’s an election year, which means there will be more deficit spending. There are plenty of catalysts to fuel stocks higher. Nobody knows how high.

Granted, nothing goes straight up. Pullbacks and corrections are a normal part of every bull market. Seasonality is bearish between now and May and yet some parts of the market haven’t shown any traces of pausing. There are some bearish momentum divergences. Consumer staples are outperforming in the past few months which is typically defensive. Small and mid-caps stocks have significantly underperformed year-to-date. They are a much smaller part of the market than they used to be. The current market cap of all Russell 2000 companies is $2.5 Trillion. Just Microsoft alone has a market cap of 3.1 Trillion. Apple is at 2.9T. Google and Amazon are at 1.8T each. Nvidia is 1.6T. Meta is 1.2T. Each of these is big enough to be an index/ETF on its own.