Last Week Was Noisy But Went Nowhere

Some stats for you. The last Money Stuff of 2018 was sent out in the morning of December 20; the previous day, the S&P 500 Index had closed at 2506.96. The first Money Stuff of 2019—this one—is going out in the morning of Wednesday, January 2; the previous trading day, Monday, December 31, the S&P closed at 2506.85. That’s a seven-trading-day move of 0.11 points, or about 0.004 percent. In the last ten years, there have been only six seven-trading-day periods with smaller stock-market moves. Basically my vacation was as quiet as the stock market ever gets, if you look only at the endpoints, which I did, because, remember, I was on vacation.

In the middle, it was otherwise. The market went down a lot for a couple of days, and then it had an up 5 percent day last Wednesday, December 26, a day that was so good that it “was the first time ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg that stretches back to 1990, in which more than 500 stocks in the S&P 500 finished positive.”1 But it all ended up where it was when I left. Which is still not great; the market ended 2018 down about 6.2 percent for the year.