The Dow And The S&P 500 Soar To Brand New All-Time Record Highs – How Is This Possible?

The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at all-time record highs on Tuesday, and that is very good news.  You might think that is an odd statement coming from the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, but the truth is that I am not at all eager to see the financial system crash and burn.  We all saw what took place when it happened in 2008 – millions of people lost their jobs, millions of people lost their homes, and economic suffering was off the charts.  So no, I don’t want to see that happen again any time soon.  All of our lives will be a lot more comfortable if the financial markets are stable and stocks continue to go up.  If the Dow and the S&P 500 can keep on soaring, that will suit me just fine.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to be what happens.

Of course I never imagined we would be talking about new record highs for the stock market in mid-July 2016.  We have seen some crazy ups and downs for the financial markets over the last 12 months, and the downs were pretty severe.  Last August, we witnessed the greatest financial shaking since the historic financial crisis of 2008, and that was followed by an even worse shaking in January and February.  Then in June everyone was concerned that the surprising result of the Brexit vote would cause global markets to tank, and that did happen briefly, but since then we have seen an unprecedented rally.

So what is causing this sudden surge?

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s review some of the numbers from Tuesday.  The following comes from USA Today…

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The Next "Significant Risk For The S&P 500" - Kolanovic Reveals "The Macro Momentum Bubble"

Yesterday when we presented Tom DeMark's latest technical forecast, which anticipates a 5-8% bounce in risk before the next leg lower in equities, we said to "look for the next few days to see if DeMark still has his magic" adding that "we, on the other hand, would rather wait for "Gandalf" Kolanovic' next take."

We didn't have long to wait: moments ago JPM's head quant, whose uncanny track record of predicting every major market inflection point has been duly documented here, laid out his latest thoughts on the negative feedback loop that is "becoming a significant risk for the S&P 500" but also showed what he thinks is an odd divergence between various asset classes, to wit: "as some assets are near the top and others near the bottom of their historical ranges, we are obviously not experiencing an asset bubble of all risky assets, but rather a bubble in relative performance: we call it a Macro-Momentum bubble."

His warning: beware the bursting of the macro-momentum bubble.

Here is the latest warning from the man whose every single caution so far has played out virtually as predicted:

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