The Grinch Stole the Santa Claus Rally – Ep. 429

As I thought would be the case, it looks like the Grinch Stole the Santa Claus Rally.  Normally, the U.S. stock market rallies during the final five trading days of the year between Christmas and New Year’s Day. But today was not only the worst Christmas Eve day in stock market history, it blew apart the old record.  In fact, there has never been a Christmas Eve day where the S&P or the Dow fell by as much as 1%. Today, the Dow Jones dropped better than 650 points – 2.9% on the day.

Although the Dow now is the only major index not officially in a bear market (now down 19.15% from its peak), but the S&P 500, which dropped 2.7% today is now down just over 20%.  So it’s now official, Wall Street can stop pretending that it’s a correction, they have to admit that it’s a bear market. Now, if they want to hang their had on the Dow, O.K. well they can hang it there maybe for one more trading day, because it’s not going to take much for the Dow to join the party.  Of course, other indexes are extending moves into bear market territory. The Dow Transports are down 25.7%; the NASDAQ just under 24% to the downside.

The Russell 2000 is down 27.3%.  This index is down better than 5-1/2% since Donald Trump was inaugurated.  This was the index that was supposed to benefit the most from Trump’s economic policies.  It’s still up about 6% since he was elected President. So all that hype is still in there. But at the rate the index is falling, this index is going to lose those gains pretty rapidly. Then, of course, Trump is not going to be able to talk about all the wealth that has been created in the stock market since he’s been elected, because all that paper wealth will have been destroyed.