Good, Not Average, Not Great

by David Merkel, Aleph Blog

I was reading through The Wall Street Journal’s Daily Shot column, done by the estimable @SoberLook, and saw the following graph and text:

The S&P 500 move this year is completely outside the historical seasonal trends.

Graph Credit: Deutsche Bank via @SoberLook at The Wall Street Journal

Averages reveal, but they also conceal.  When I look at a graph like this, I know that any given year is highly likely to look different than an average of years.  So, no surprise that the returns on the S&P 500 are different than the averages of the prior 11 or 19 years.

But how has the S&P 500 fared versus the last 68 years?  At present this year is 20th out of 68, which is good, but not great or average.  But look at the graph at the top of this article: up until the close of the 25th trading day of the year (February 7th) the market had performance very much like a median year.  All of the higher performance has come out of the last nine days.  (For fun, it is the ninth best out of 68 for that time of year; even that is not top decile.)

I can tell you something easy: you can have a lot of different occurrences over nine days in the market.  The distribution of returns would be quite wide.  Therefore, don’t get too excited about the returns so far this year — they aren’t that abnormal.  You can be concerned as you like about valuation levels — they are high.  But 2017 at present is a “high side of normal” year compared to past price performance.

And, if you want to be concerned about a melt-up, it is this kind of low positive momentum that tends to persist, at least for a while.  Trading behavior isn’t nuts, even if valuations are somewhat steamy.

I’m around 83% invested in equity accounts, so I am conservative, but I’m not thinking of hedging yet.  Let the rally run.

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