Summary

The stock market continues to march higher, as bullish headlines are coming fast and furious. In just 24 trade days, the S&P 500 (SPX) has tacked on 18%, the Nasdaq has spiked 24.5%, and the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) has surged 24%. Those are the best 24-day returns for the indices since (you guessed it) the pandemic. Before that was when the indices were emerging from the 2008/2009 financial crisis. So if you consider a 20% move a bull market, two of the three listed above met the standard definition. We think a 24-day move is not enough to determine if an index is in a bull or bear market, but we can hold forth about that another day. (And, no, we don't have our own definition.) Maybe just as impressive, the 16-day move since the April 21 closing low has the SPX up 14%, the Nasdaq up 20%, and the QQQ up 19%. For the SPX and the Nasdaq, that's the best 16-day move since COVID-19, and before that, since April 2009. For the QQQ, it is the greatest move since April 2020 and, before that, since October 2002, which was the first rally of the new bull market that ran until 2007. The current rally has been so fast that we are seeing improvement in our weekly charts. Both the 21- and 50-week exponential moving averages (EMAs) have turned higher; the four-week