Chart o’ the Day: Have Flat Markets Been Outlawed?

The below chart comes from Mike Harris at his Price Action Lab blog and I find the question it asks to be absolutely fascinating:

He’s showing you that every pause in the US stock market over the last few years has been a quick drop and recovery, with almost no periods of consolidation (a flattening trend between uptrends).

He then goes on to show how different this period is from others – where stocks were able to flatline before resuming uptrends. he posits the question of whether this is being caused by randomness or the presence of too many alpha-chasing managers or something else entirely.

This is your must-read post today:

The 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s (Price Action Lab)