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Friday, December 9, 2016

Late-year rally

Update: The article related to this Sunday's New York Times print piece will be posted on the evening of December 17.  The prequel article in the meantime is here.  Thank you.

It’s easy to fault this on President-elect Trump, since all the cognoscenti idiots also got that Brexit call so right.  It is mesmerizing to see the recent run in the financial markets here and around the globe, though it is not necessarily informative about what the near-term future will hold.  Often we see a consolidation in market metrics, which at times seem to stretch toward “extremes”.  Such extreme levels are seldom known ex-ante, but they can probabilistically be more in concordance with one another than people appreciate.  Also streaks in one direction, can often beget (more) streaks in that same direction.  This year-end rally however does offer fingerprints of being long in the tooth, and preparing for a break.

See this monthly chart below, which focuses on the past two years where a promising pattern of increased up-days in the markets has taken hold (a pattern uniquely dissimilar from others we see in the past decades plus worth of data).

 
We communicate the interesting rise in portion of up-days, which we will experience as long runs in the market in the upward direction.  Sometimes >1%daily moves each time, and other times barely a few basis points added.  Regardless, this offers irony to Janet Yellen’s Federal Reserve who assert that their "data-dependent" intonation sees ongoing systematic financial risk stopping it from raising their interest rate more often. 

We also see (in green) that spikes in such streaks within a month are the firewood for the (in silver) coinciding rally swings we also see through the year itself.  Friday December 9's close further buttresses this pattern of mostly up-days in December (quirky, but also the first time in 5 years that we had a M-Tu-W-Th-Fr up-streak of all major averages).  Of course we see evidenced here that those nice times for a passive investor generally don't last in the near-term (next several weeks).  Don't be anxious if you observe another several weeks of good-times of record highs, but do be forewarned that when the bear gods return from their torpor they often pounce with a nasty Grinch-like take-back (here, here, here)!

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