The S&P 500 hit the milestone of 2,000 yesterday before backing off. Today, it closed at 2,000 sharp, as if by coincidence. It’s up nearly 200% since March 2009. It hasn’t seen even a run-of-the-mill nothing-to-worry-about correction of 10% in almost three years, though these corrections occur about every 12 months in normal times. ‘Buy the dips’ rules, with dips getting ever smaller and shorter as traders are motivated by the only remaining fear, the fear of being left out.
With all this enthusiasm for stocks, you’d think there’d be some volume, some serious buying, to back it up. But yesterday, the day when the S&P 500 snuggled up to 2000, it was the lightest non-holiday volume day since, gosh – someone did the math – October 2006.
This condition of mysteriously drying up volume has piqued the curiosity of Cali Money Man, a portfolio manager at a big bank and WOLF STREET contributor, who has been on the job through the last three crashes:
I asked a Street technician about the low volume advance and the pattern in recent years for the market to rise on low volume and fall on high volume. The first rule I learned about this biz in 1978 was VID: volume indicates direction. But no longer. High volume has become a ‘contrarian indicator,’ the street technician explained. It’s a ‘sign of stress or a crisis.’
This post was published at Wolf Street on August 26, 2014.
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