Same Old Market Anaesthesia

As the election dust continues to settle the level of confusion seems to be rising.

And as regards “The Trump Rally" keep in mind that the view from 20,000 feet saw the SPY hit a high of 219.60 in mid-August; that’s about a percentage point or so from where we are now.

While it’s true we’ve advanced from the interim lows, remember that the market went down for 11 straight days running into the Thursday before the election.

It then gyrated wildly overnight as futures moved down over 900 Dow Jones points during election results night, and then the market bottomed as the new day dawned.

Points have been added while sector shifts have been vicious in the near-term. The Dow Jones index has been the heavy lifter.

Note that the move for the Dow has been primarily relegated to three stocks: Goldman Sachs' rally over the past month has added about 320 points; UnitedHealth has added about 150 points; and Caterpillar's run has added about 95 points.

This suggests we should stay focused on the broader market and remain confident in two things:

• It's still the first inning, no outs, one guy on base and this is a very, very long game
• There is much work to be done still ahead, so pray for a market correction to take advantage of.

Back in late 2012 we saw the markets slowly meandering upward out of the Great Recession lows, and the "slowest recovery on record" was getting lots of press.

Everyone was constantly on guard for the next correction - and this is back when years of severe corrections had bled into the psyche making investors weary of another.

The pain had become like a kind of numbing effect: We called it "the market's anaesthesia."

Our message then was clear:

"It is this writer's view that we have spent so long fretting over the next correction, that we will very likely miss the new lesson: a period of no corrections. A period where news will have to be made up after the fact - as it usually is - to match price action. A period where markets will simply keep rising - matching little of the fears so deeply embedded today."

As we now know, the markets then proceeded to go straight up for all of 2013 and half of 2014 until we hit the energy ceiling.

Now, just as in 2012, we have watched a near two-year period where markets went nowhere until about a month ago.