Stock Market Today: September 25th - 29th, 2023

Morning Lineup - 9/27/23 - Can We Get a Bounce?
Wed, Sep 27, 2023

As the market declines this month, the number of ‘believers’ is starting to shrink, and while they haven’t necessarily turned bearish yet, former bulls are looking over their shoulders. The prospect of a government shutdown is just one of many concerns weighing on investors this week, and based on the intransigence of both parties, making a deal before the deadline looks increasingly difficult. The quote above from Ignatius of Loyola may be over 500 years old, but it’s just as applicable today as it was back then. With each side of the aisle increasingly locked into their tribal ideology, no amount of ‘proof’ is enough to get the other to see ‘the light’.

Futures have been trending higher all morning as the market looks to regroup from yesterday’s beating. The only data on the economic calendar this morning was Durable Goods orders which came in higher than expected for August (+0.2% vs. -0.5%), but July’s reading was revised down to -5.6% from -5.2%.

With the S&P 500 falling to its most extreme oversold levels of the year yesterday, it should come as no surprise that most of them are also at what we would classify as ‘extreme’ oversold levels. The only sector even above its 50-day moving average is Energy. Declines have been broad-based during the sell-off of the last week. Real Estate and Consumer Discretionary are both down 5.81% followed by Technology, Utilities, and Financials which are all down over 4%. Just to illustrate how bad a week it has been, the two best-performing sectors – Health Care and Energy – are down well over 1%.

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Wednesday, September 27th, 2023.

 

Good morning StonkForumers! Happy Thursday to all of you and welcome to the new trading day and a frrrrrrrrrrrresh start. Here is a quick check on those futures as we are about 30 minutes into the US cash market open.

GLTA on this Thursday, September the 28th, 2023!

 

Morning Lineup - 9/28/23 - Ted Williams Month
Thu, Sep 28, 2023

Futures are getting a bit of a boost this morning as revised GDP for Q2 was slightly weaker than expected coming in at 2.1% versus forecasts for a reading of 2.2%. Other data saw some larger moves. Personal Consumption was more than cut in half from 1.7% down to 0.8% while the GDP Price Index was revised down to 1.7% from 2.0%. Initial Jobless Claims rose 3K from 201K up to 204K, but that was still more than 10K below the consensus forecasts. Overall, this data was market friendly pushing equity futures higher and yields lower. The 10-year yield which touched 4.65% earlier is now slightly below 4.61%.

In a meaningless doubleheader to close out the MLB season 82 years ago, Ted Williams got six meaningful hits in eight at-bats pushing his average to .406 becoming the first player since 1930 and the last player since then to hit .400 (Williams also hit a home run on his last career at-bat on this day 19 years later in 1960). Hitting .400 is next to impossible in baseball (hence the quote above), but in the stock market it isn’t very good. Heading into today’s trading, the S&P 500 has traded higher on just eight out of eighteen sessions which works out to 44.4% of all trading days, but if the last two trading days are negative, September will finish off as a .400 month. If that happens, we’ll just call it Ted Williams month!

There hasn’t been a lot of good news to speak of lately, but maybe the image from our Seasonality snapshot below will brighten your mood a bit. While the upcoming week ranks in just the 29th percentile of all one-week periods throughout the year, the next month ranks in the 89th percentile, and the next three months rank in the 100th percentile. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but from a seasonality perspective, it doesn’t get much better than that!

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Thursday, September 28th, 2023.

 

Good morning StonkForumers! Happy Friday to all of you and welcome to the final trading day of the week, month and quarter and a frrrrrrrrrrrresh start. Here is a quick check on those futures as we are about 2 hours into the US cash market open.

GLTA on this Friday, September the 29th, 2023!

 

Morning Lineup -- 9/29/23
Fri, Sep 29, 2023

Futures have added to earlier gains following the latest batch of economic data which included Personal Income, Personal Spending, and PCE Inflation data. There were no notable surprises, but if there's one headline to take from the data it was that the PCE Core Deflator finally dropped below 4% (3.9%), although the move was expected.

News headlines for the last 24 hours have been focused on the fact that Congress has been unable to pass a measure to keep the government from shutting down this weekend, which is fitting given the fact that it was fifteen years ago today that Congress couldn’t get its act together and pass the $700 billion bank bailout plan. The bailout bill ultimately authorized and led to the creation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, otherwise known as TARP. In the days leading up to the Congressional vote on the plan, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson reportedly got down on one knee in front of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and begged her not to “blow it up”, leading Ms. Pelosi to reply with the quote above.

Whatever your views towards TARP are in retrospect, when Congress failed to pass the measure, an already ugly market turned Medusa-like. As shown below in the intraday chart of the S&P 500 from that day, you don’t need a label to show you when it was that the bill failed to pass. Just as the market was starting to stabilize from a morning swoon, the bottom fell out of the bottom, and by the time the closing bell rang, the S&P 500 was down 8.8% for its largest one-day decline since the 1987 crash on 10/19/87. Since then, there have been four other days that were worse with two more in 2008 and then two more during the COVID crash. Ironically, it was probably the market’s reaction to the bill getting voted down that enabled passage a few days later.



Historically, the last trading day of September has had a negative bias. Over the last 50 years, the S&P 500’s median change on this day has been a decline of 0.18% with gains just 44% of the time. Trading has been particularly weak in the last two years with declines of over 1% on the last day of September each time. Thankfully on Wall Street this morning, the only problem traders are dealing with is flooding rains getting to and from New York City (if they’re even leaving their houses in the first place).

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Friday, September 29th, 2023.

 

here is the quick sneak peek at next week's notable ERs per EW. have a great weekend guys!