Going Nowhere

The S&P 500 is kicking off the week with a gain of over 1% as of midday Monday. In multiple ways, it has been a sharp turnaround from last week. For starters, last week saw the S&P 500 fall on all five trading days, with the last three sessions having remarkably small moves. As shown below, the index was basically flat from Wednesday to Friday as each day didn’t even see a move greater than 10 bps.  Additionally, we would note that despite the five-day losing streak, it wasn’t exactly all doom and gloom as the index also had positive breadth on each of the five days.

Historically, it has been uncommon for the S&P 500 to move so little day-to-day as it did last week. As shown below and as we first highlighted in Friday’s Sector Snapshot, last week was the first time the index rose or fell less than 10 bps for at least three days in a row since September 2019. In total, since the start of the five-day trading week in 1953, the S&P 500 has only had similar streaks 53 times (including this most recent instance). Given the over 1% gain as of this writing, the current streak is likely to end today, which would check out historically as only a handful of these prior streaks extended to more than three days. In fact, since 1970 only two streaks have lasted more than three days: a four-day streak ending in May 1979 and a five-day streak ending in November 2014.

Finally, we would note that this latest string of snoozer sessions comes on a slight upswing in volatility.  As shown below, over the past 100 sessions, the S&P 500 has averaged a move of 0.72%. While that’s far from earning any superlatives, it ranks in the 70th percentile of readings over the past several decades.

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