130 S&P 500 companies hit 52-week highs yesterday.
Things must be even better than I thought in yesterday’s post and there has been a conga line of pom-pom waving analysts on CNBC this morning telling us how UNDER valued everything is because we just don’t see the BIG PICTURE. As Bespoke notes in their chart of the S&P and it’s new highs, you want to see more and more stocks hitting new highs to sustain a rally but my question is – with the market now at 17-month highs and making new highs every day – what’s up with the other 370 stocks?
In an ordinary market, I wouldn’t question it but this is not an ordinary market. 52 weeks ago we were at 666 on the S&P and stocks were making DECADE lows. Here we are with the index up almost 80% off that bottom and we can’t pull a lousy 52-week high from 2/3 of the index??? We’ll be keeping an eye on this indicator to see how things pan out but notice when the market fell – there were no doubts, 80% of the stocks made 52-week lows last fall – not THAT’S a sell-off. That’s the kind of dramatic numbers you expect to see in a dramatic market move – not this wimpy 40% stuff – let’s see some conviction people!
AAPL is convicted – they are up 191% from their lows and AAPL is 15% of the Nasdaq so, all by themselves, AAPL has accounted for 28% of the Nasdaq’s move from 1,265 to 2,389 (89%). TRV is also moving with conviction, up 54% since March and adding 160 much-needed points to the Dow, a great swap for C, who would have only added about 24 had they remained in the index. CSCO replaced GM (because they are soooooo similar) and they too have been a great trade for the Dow, up 100% off the March lows and slapping 104 bonuse points on the index.
Ah, now we see how our industrials can do so well despite all the unemployment and lower cap utilization and lack of demand and high commodity input costs – we just shuffle the deck until we find a set of cards that work! Even so, as I’ve pointed out this week, the Dow has been lagging the Nasdaq and the Russell by a wide margin and the NYSE and S&P have been kind of pokey too. The Nasaq…
