A Rare Bullish Sign

Friday’s market action wasn’t just a sigh of relief – it actually kicked off a somewhat rare market indicator that suggests the meltup has begun.

Some context? We’ve been critial of the stock market for its high concentration – with Nvidia and Microsoft alone making up over 15% of the weighting in the widely-followed S&P 500.

It doesn’t take a big move from either of those companies to weigh on the index. Market breadth – the percentage of total companies moving up or down – is another factor.

So what happened Friday? A rare “90/90 day.”

That’s when 90% of stocks advanced at the same time – a massive level of market breadth. And when 90% of stocks also rose on heavy volume, suggesting a fundamental shift, not a one-time reaction to news:

Turn Your Images On

Friday’s 90/90 day shows tremendous volume and breadth in a market that has sometimes lacked it. (Source: Carson)

When these 90/90 days occur, the market is up – believe it or not 90% of the time a year later. And on average, it’s up by more than average – 23%.

“This is one of those charts that seems out of odds when they occur,” notes our Portfolio Director Andrew Packer. “90/90 days triggered often in the first few years after the Great Financial Crisis, and sure enough, stocks rose higher, even if they seemed overvalued or the economy seemed too sluggish at the time to justify the trend.”

If that’s the case this time around, the seasonal market dip this year may give way to what Grey Swan Fraternity member Mark Jeftovic has been calling a “terrifying bull market” – where stocks rally not because of fundamentals, but because investors perceive it as the place to be to avoid inflation.

~ Addison

P.S. Stocks weren’t the only assets that popped higher on Friday as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell hinted that rate cuts were coming, inflation or not.

Gold popped higher on the news. Makes sense in our “terrifying bull market” thesis.

And bitcoin jumped higher, although it sold off over the weekend as large players decided to take some profits off the table. Both are excellent long-term inflation-protecting assets, and gold in particular is well off of where it should trade based on our calculations.

If you have any questions for us about the market, send them our way now to: Addison@GreySwanFraternity.com.

Friday’s market action wasn’t just a sigh of relief – it actually kicked off a somewhat rare market indicator that suggests the meltup has begun.

Some context? We’ve been critial of the stock market for its high concentration – with Nvidia and Microsoft alone making up over 15% of the weighting in the widely-followed S&P 500.

It doesn’t take a big move from either of those companies to weigh on the index. Market breadth – the percentage of total companies moving up or down – is another factor.

So what happened Friday? A rare “90/90 day.”

Turn Your Images On

Friday’s 90/90 day shows tremendous volume and breadth in a market that has sometimes lacked it. (Source: Carson)

When these 90/90 days occur, the market is up – believe it or not 90% of the time a year later. And on average, it’s up by more than average – 23%.

~ Addison

P.S. Stocks weren’t the only assets that popped higher on Friday as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell hinted that rate cuts were coming, inflation or not.

Gold popped higher on the news. Makes sense in our “terrifying bull market” thesis.

If you have any questions for us about the market, send them our way now to: Addison@GreySwanFraternity.com.

Yesterday’s Fed meeting offered something for everyone.

For bullish investors, the quarter-point rate cut provided a clear signal. And the Fed is just about done with its quantitative tightening.

But for the bears, Powell doused expectations that a December rate cut was 100% on the table.

In the past, weapon systems took decades to build and changed slowly. Autonomy changes this. For example, new capabilities developed by field tests or simulation (testing scenarios in full physics simulators depicting actual environments) could be downloaded to existing weapon systems, making it possible to upgrade a weapon system significantly without any meaningful hardware changes. A process of improvement that used to take many years would shrink to weeks and, in time, days.

Markets heard what they wanted. NVIDIA’s stock surged premarket on news that Trump would discuss the company’s Blackwell AI chip with Xi, pushing it to an unprecedented $5 trillion valuation.

Meanwhile, China quietly bought its first cargoes of U.S. soybeans this season — a symbolic gesture that reminded traders that diplomacy still runs on trade.

“It’s not détente,” wrote Bloomberg’s Jennifer Welch this morning, “It is a dealmaking with a timer.” Wall Street is ambivalent on peace, but they do like profits.

In the background, China’s biotech sector continues its ethically murky sprint forward — this week, reports surfaced of Chinese scientists creating monkeys engineered to exhibit schizophrenia and autism.

A high concentration of capital in a few stocks at the top ranks high among the features we detailed in Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble.

On days like yesterday, headlines urge investors to buy. However, they also underscore the fragility of this terrifying bull market: just a handful of names can make the difference between a big up day and a big down day.