The stock market’s glowing core can’t hide the dark edges – rather like this photo I 
snapped of the Yampa River in downtown Steamboat springs at twilight.
Speaking of which, summer tinkled its departure bell up high. We saw the first yellowing aspen leaves last week, and the temperature before sunrise on the far side of Rabbit Ears Pass was 30 degrees, leaving a frosty sheen on the late-summer grass.
The last hour yesterday in stocks sent a chill too. Nothing shouts market structure like lost mojo in a snap. I listened to pundits trying to figure out why. Maybe a delay in stimulus. Inflation. Blah blah. I didn’t hear anyone blame Kamala Harris.
It’s not that we know everything. Nobody does. I do think our focus on the mechanics, the machinery, the rules, puts us closer to the engines running things than most observers.
And machines are running the market. Machines shift from things that have risen to things that have fallen, taking care to choose chunks of both that have liquidity for movement. Then all the talking heads try to explain the moves in rational terms.
But it’s math. Ebbs and flows (Jim Simons, the man who solved the market at Renaissance Technologies, saw the market that way).
Passives have been out of Consumer Staples. Monday they rushed back and blue chips surged. The Nasdaq, laden with Tech, is struggling. It’s been up for a long time. Everybody is overweight and nobody has adjusted weightings in months. We can see it.
By the way, MSCI rebalances hit this week (tomorrow on the ModernIR Planning Calendar).
This is market structure. It’s morphed into a glowing core of central tendencies, such as 22% of all market capitalization now rests on FB, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, MSFT, AMD, TSLA and SHOP.
That’s the glowing core. When they glow less, the dark edges grow.
Then there’s money. Dough. Bucks. Specifically, the US dollar and its relationship to other global currencies. When the dollar falls, commodities surge. It’s tipped into the darkness the past month, marking one of its steepest modern dives. Gold hit a record, silver surged, producer prices dependent on raw commodities exploded.
Then the dollar stopped diving. It’s up more than 1% in the last five days. And wham! Dark edges groped equities late yesterday. Gold plunged. Silver pirouetted off a 15% cliff.
August is traditionally when big currency-changes occur. Aug last year (massive move for the dollar versus the Chinese Renminbi Aug 5, 2019). Aug 2015. Aug 2018. Currencies rattle prices because currencies underpin, define, denominate, prices.
Back up to Feb 2020. The dollar moved up sharply in late February, hitting the market Monday, Feb 24, as new options traded. Pandemic!
Options expire next week. The equivalent day is Aug 24, when new options will trade. Nobody knows when the dark edges will become cloying hands reaching for our investment returns or equity values.
In fact, Market Structure Sentiment™, our algorithm predictively metering the ebb and flow of different trading behaviors, peaked July 28 at 7.7 of 10.0, a strong read. Strong reads create arcs but say roughly five trading days out, give or take, stocks fall.
They didn’t. Until yesterday anyway. They just arced. The behavior giving equities lift since late July in patterns was Fast Trading, machines chasing relative prices in fractions of seconds – which are more than 53% of total volume.
Then Market Structure Sentiment bottomed Aug 7 at 5.3, which in turn suggests the dark edges will recede in something like five trading days. Could be eight. Might be three.
Except we didn’t have dark edges until all at once at 3pm ET yesterday.
Maybe it lasts, maybe it doesn’t. But there’s a vital lesson for public companies and investors about the way the market works. The shorter the timeframe of the money setting prices, the more statistically probable it becomes that the market suddenly and without warning dives into the dark.
It’s because prices for most stocks are predicated only on the most recent preceding prices. Not some analyst’s expectation, not a multiple of future earnings, not hopes for an economic recovery in 2021.
Prices reflect preceding prices. If those stall, the whole market can dissolve into what traders call crumbling quotes. The pandemic nature of short-term behavior hasn’t faded at the edges. It’s right there, looming. We see it in patterns.
If something ripples here in August, it’ll be the dark edges, or the dollar. Not the 2021 economy.
