After a strong showing on Monday to start the new week, things got ugly after a nominally higher start yesterday, as ostensibly two reports that resulted in higher bond yields put things sharply lower, as this pattern of extreme volatility in both directions has become the basic market scenario.

Rising technology stocks yesterday salvaged out a winning session, but all of the major indices did suffer large intraday declines from their record mid-day highs.

In another awful session, what began with large gains in the major indices which could have gotten the Santa Claus rally back to positive if gone the distance, the indices just fell apart very badly but were able to come back from really bad early afternoon losses to end only modestly lower.

In another awful session, what began with large gains in the major indices which could have gotten the Santa Claus rally back to positive if gone the distance, the indices just fell apart very badly but were able to come back from really bad early afternoon losses to end only modestly lower.

The market ended the final day of 2024 in somewhat of a pattern that it has been trending lately, namely the major indices lower for the fourth straight day, but this time investors had a little pity on some of the worst Dow performers and gave them a break while breadth numbers were actually positive for a change. But the high-flying technology stocks continued to weaken once again.

After starting out the traditionally bullish Santa Claus rally last Tuesday with a nice gain, the market has now fallen for three straight sessions and is in danger of ending this period with a decline as there are now three days to go. And they are today plus the final two days this week on Thursday and Friday.

After starting the first two days of the holiday-shortened week on the strong side, things cooled off a bit to end the week, and Friday the market did really poorly.

The second day of the 5 + 2 sessions ended yesterday with the major indices ending mixed as the S&P and Nasdaq ended nominally down after having made a nice comeback from their early morning lows.

In the two days since the last newsletter on Monday, the market has done very well, with the half-day before Christmas on Tuesday being a real upside moonshot with the Dow exploding upward for a 390 point advance to 43,297 with 28 of its 30 members higher. It was now the fourth better day in a row.

Federal Reserve officials are closely watching how inflation shapes up as they decide when and how much to cut interest rates in 2025, and the latest inflation data offers reasons for both concern and hope.

In what turned out to be a weaker session after the major indices could not hold large early gains, the market ended mostly lower with only the Dow eking out a nominal gain of only 15 points after being ahead by 461 on the opening. It was helped by AMZN, AAPL, NVDA in addition to BA, GS, IBM and V.

How many times have I said that on Fed days, unless you have something to do early on, that it pays to wait until Fed Chair Powell makes his presentation before getting a better sense of what is going to happen from 2pm into the close. And I hope those who followed this advice did better than those who might have bought early because from a session where the Dow had the nerve to try to break its nine historic losing days in a row and the S&P and Nasdaq were trying to end positive as well, the market unfortunately made one of the most miserable showings in history from that time into the close.

The market yesterday did what it has done so often lately, namely the pathetic Dow falling for the eighth straight session and the last time that this took place was back in 2018 while the Nasdaq achieved another new record high on strength in most of the large technology stocks.

The market ended the week on Friday in a pattern that has become more familiar, as now for 10 straight days, more stocks have declined than risen, which is the longest such streak since 2000.

The recent corrective phase of the market continued yesterday, as various economic reports were used to explain the selloff, which was the eighth out of nine for the Dow and now the S&P is down by four of the last six sessions.

In another sign of near-term weakness in the market, the S&P underwent its first back-to-back losses in nearly a month and the Dow declined for the sixth time in the past seven sessions, so things are showing signs of investors taking profits in many of the stocks that have led the strong rally this year.

I had pointed out that the VIX had very good support at around the 13 level which it closed slightly under on Friday. So this strong area finally held today and pushed the market lower as it went higher.

The huge rally for stocks lost momentum on Thursday as investors waited for the big jobs report that is coming at 8:30am today. The crypto market had more action, and bitcoin briefly broke to a new intraday record of $104,550 before pulling back to end slightly lower.

Once again, the newfound strength in the large technology leaders helped propel the S&P and Nasdaq to further new records yesterday. And for the first time this week, the Dow finally contributed to the upside with a large gain of 308 to 45,014 motivated by a huge earnings-related move in CRM, plus nice gains in AMZN, IBM, MSFT and NVDA and notice what group these ones belong to.

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