The pre-holiday week ended today without closing once on a positive note. The NASDAQ and the S&P500 posted their fifth successive decline while the DJIA dropped for the sixth day in a row.Prices, however, fell only moderately; losses were limited to -.47 percent.
In the past ten days, the value of the S&P500 dropped -8.5 percent, as the index fell from 1117 to 1022. That percentage of decline ranks as the 59th largest since 2000 and stands in place 108 overall, since 1950.
We return again to the theme of where is this market going and consider the diagram. It plots the daily closing price of the S&P500 from just before the last top in October 2007 to today. The other line represents the percent changes from the close of ten days ago. This presentation reveals that the recent rates of 10 day percentage change are declining, along the with the S&P500 price. Whereas these recent values remain far above those of registered before the final phase of the drop that ended in March 2009, the latest ones mirror the magnitudes just before, and during the early part of the October 2007 top.
Obviously, this interpretation is a judgment call. Readers may interpret these relationships in a different manner. However, in face of the many earlier analyses suggesting that prices will continue to move higher, these data represent the third call of caution and lower values in the future.
DJIA -.47 percent
NASDAQ -.46 percent
S&P500 -.47 percent