Monday Market Movement – Wasted Spring

Nowhere for 3 months. 

That’s where we’ve gone with Q2 all but completed and that’s a shame when we were just kissing all-time highs a couple of weeks ago but it’s all evaporated since then though it has not been bad for our portfolios (See Friday’s Reviews) – as we were pretty skeptical of the rally.  We didn’t get more bearish as we think 33,000 should hold up on the Dow for at least a bounce and, falling from 35,000 is a 2,000-point drop so we expect 400-point bounces to 33,400 (weak) and 33,800 (strong).  If we fail to take back and hold 33,800, THEN we may have a serious problem but the Futures are already giving us a weak bounce on pretty much zero volume (so meaningless).

The S&P 500 is still up 4% from March’s close and that’s more meaningful than the Dow.   The Nasdaq was at 13,300 and now 14,100 so 800 points is 6% higher than we were on April Fools Day while the Russell is actually a bit lower than it was.  So mixed signals from the majors and mixed signals in other Global Markets are not what you expect from a record-high market yet, so far, no sell-off has gone unrebounded – we’ll just have to keep our eye on the data to figure out what’s coming next.

While most people are expecting a strong 2nd half rebound in the economy (Q1 was 6.4% better than last year), 5% of that is inflation and strains are already showing on the other 1.4%.  Case in point: American Airlines (AAL) cancelled about 120 flights on Saturday and 176 on Sunday (about 6% of its mainline operation that day). While some were called off a few days in advance, about half of those were because of “unavailable flight crews.”   

“The bad weather, combined with the labor shortages some of our vendors are contending with and the incredibly quick ramp up of customer demand, has led us to build in additional resilience and certainty to our operation by adjusting a fraction of our scheduled flying through mid-July,” American Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Jantz said in a statement. 

There are parts shortages (chips and other items) as well as the supply chains are still nowhere near back to normal but labor is a huge issue…

Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.