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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The market started the new month of December with a day of trading similar to the earlier type of method that began the rally months ago, namely of the large technology stocks leading the way as the broader market lagged to a certain extent.

The month of November ended on Friday during the holiday-shortened Thanksgiving time period with a strong gain as the Dow gained 188 points to 44,910 led by advances in BA, SHW, GS and HON. It was the 47th record high close for this index.

In another astounding upside day, the Dow turned a 310 point morning loss into a closing gain of 123 to its best ever close at 44,860. It was finally led in this process by the old-time large technology stocks which have not done so great lately, bur finally caught the wind at their backs for a change, and this included AMZN, MSFT, AAPL plus CRM.

Stocks rose again on Monday, and were led by those that can benefit from the most from lower interest rates and a stronger economy leading the way.

After a huge runup in the days following the election, things came crashing down on Friday for the worst week since September and the fourth day in a row lower for the Nasdaq.