(taps microphone) WE ALREADY HAD THE BEAR MARKET

Raymond James’s’s’s Andrew Adams is out with a reminder about the bear market you may have already forgotten about – it took place in 2015 in a very stealth way and effected all but the ten largest stocks in the S&P 500. The indices weren’t nearly as effected as their underlying components were, so it doesn’t show up in your favorite index ETF’s price chart, but, my friends, it was grueling.

Here’s Mr. Adams:

I’ve used this stat before, but it still astounds me that during 2015 if you had put all your capital into the largest ten companies in the U.S. stock market, you would have ended up making about 20% on the year, yet if you had held the other 490 companies in the S&P 500 instead, you would have actually been down about 3%. Talk about a strangely narrow market! Of course, that period culminated in the stealth tactical bear market in early 2016 when, at the February 11 low, the S&P 500 stocks were down an average of 26.7% from their 52-week highs and stocks in the Russell 3000 were down an astonishing 37.3%, on average. We still contend that was probably the “bear market” that many are still predicting even now, but it does not qualify in the eyes of some purists since the S&P 500 itself was “only” down about 15% from its previous all-time high instead of the requisite 20%.

Batnick and I were talking about this just now. We were screaming about this stealth bear as it was happening. Nobody cared much at the time in the financial media, because the index Bigs were holding up appearances.

But the enlightened investor takes note of this sort of thing and keeps it handy for the next time a doomer calls the present state of affairs “euphoric” or “irrationally exuberant”.

It wasn’t very long ago that the indices corrected through time, while their components corrected through price, beneath the surface.

Source:

Investment Strategy: “Charts of the Week”
Raymond James – April 19th 2017