The S&P 500 started Wednesday’s session -0.5% in the red as the index continues struggling for a direction under 4,200 resistance.
For all the naysayers attacking this “overbought” market, Wednesday morning’s weakness failed to trigger a wider wave of selling. It only took a few hours before prices bounced back to breakeven.
While the index finished flat for the day, that’s a resilient performance for stocks. If this market were as fragile and vulnerable as the critics claim, the selling would have accelerated, not stalled, and bounced.
Lucky for readers, we recognized the market’s indecisiveness a while ago and used that insight to our advantage. As I wrote last week:
The lack of a breakout or a breakdown is frustrating the people who are trading in anticipation of these things. As I’ve been saying for a while, this is a range-bound market and that means lots and lots of reversals. If a person has profits and they are not collecting them, those profits will be gone in days, if not hours. Savvy traders know this is the environment to stay nimble and take profits early and often.
Novice traders love to claim the market is rigged when it doesn’t do what they want. I never understand this argument because if these traders know the market is rigged, why don’t they use that insight to follow the rigging and print money???
Don’t fall for lame excuses. If you lose money, it means your trading thesis is wrong, plain, and simple. Rather than accuse banks or the Fed of cheating, recognize your mistake and change your approach. That’s the only way to survive the market over the long haul.
As for what comes next, last week, I was wary of a near-term step back following March’s big run. But holding near the highs for a few weeks suggests these levels are real. As I often remind readers, a market that refuses to go down will eventually rise.
As high as stocks seem, seeing the index break through 4,200 over the next few days or weeks wouldn't surprise me. I don’t expect a big breakout, but poking our heads above this key resistance level seems all but inevitable. If we were going to crash, it would have happened by now.