Prices closed higher, ending their two day decline. Yet the outlook for tomorrow favors another negative day, since the record shows that, in the past, there were 20 declines against 16 advances for today’s pattern.
The current interruption of recent gains prompts a look at the last two bull markets, to compare the profile of their peaks to the current high of August 2. On that day, the S&P500 closed at 1709.67 – and prices have been in retreat since then.
The first vertical line at day zero indicates the highs of the 2003 and 2007 prices; we set our current top on that same time line. That occurred 18 trading days ago.
It is easy to see that the 2013 record surpasses the others, though the profile of prices is quite similar. While current prices remain below their high, note that at today’s close they remain at 95.6 percent of that August 2 record.
That performance outranks the previous bull markets: they fell to 92.6 percent of their highest level on the 18th trading day after their tops.
That good news must be tempered though by the similarity of these price profiles and the fact that prices never recovered –but continued to fall- in the two earlier expansions.
DJIA .33 percent
NASDAQ .41 percent
S&P500 .27 percent
