A “can’t miss” strategy

After a soft start, the S&P 500 nudged its way to another all-time high on Wednesday, riding on the back of its mega-cap components. The recovery from the soft start coincided with Microsoft (MSFT) announcing the world’s first quantum chip powered by Topological Core architecture.

That news seemed to draw out the buy-the-dip crowd, which was lying in wait for its cue.

Still, it wasn’t an overly excited market. Breadth figures skewed in favor of decliners at the NYSE and Nasdaq; and the Russell 2000 finished the day down 0.3%. Those points aside, the stock market overall continued to trade with an air of resilience to selling pressure.

It will be tasked with doing the same at today’s open.

Currently, the S&P 500 futures are down 16 points and are trading 0.3% below fair value, the Nasdaq 100 futures are down 45 points and are trading 0.2% below fair value, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures are down 140 points and are trading 0.4% below fair value.

The negative disposition is rooted in part on concerns about the market’s trading behavior, which has felt complacent at times, speculative at others, and generally nonplussed at whatever comes its way. There has been an indefatigable embrace of the buy-the-dip approach, which, to be fair, is understandable since it has worked time and time again.

That is why you often hear us say the “price action” will be closely watched. Seems like a glib thing to say since stock prices obviously get watched every day, but in this case the price action is key because the buy-the-dip approach has not really suffered a failure to perform, so a lot more retail participants are globbing onto it as a “can’t miss” strategy.

That is when it becomes a bigger short-term risk. A failure of the buy-the-dip approach will shake out weak-handed holders of new positions banking on its success and it will invite a momentum shift in the price action that can have a cascading effect in some instances.

Beyond this factor, a 6% decline in Dow component Walmart (WMT) is playing a part in the negative disposition. Walmart topped the fiscal Q4 consensus EPS estimate, but its fiscal Q1 and full-year guidance came in below analysts’ consensus expectations. It would be remiss not to add that WMT is up 15.1% since the start of the year, leaving the stock ripe for some selling interest following a report that didn’t live up to the high expectations embedded in that gain.

Walmart’s price action, however, isn’t having a domino effect per se. Alibaba (BABA) and Shake Shack (SHAK), for instance, are up 10.1% and 12.8%, respectively, following their reports.

Separately, this morning’s economic data isn’t holding much sway over things either.

• Initial jobless claims for the week ending February 15 increased by 5,000 to 219,000 (Briefing.com consensus 217,000) while continuing jobless claims for the week ending February 8 increased by 24,000 to 1.869 million.
  • The key takeaway from the report is that it covers the period in which the household survey for the employment report is conducted, and with the continued low level of initial jobless claims, economists are apt to be expecting a fairly solid increase in February nonfarm payrolls.
• The February Philadelphia Fed Index checked in at 18.1 (Briefing.com consensus 20.5) versus 44.3 in January. The dividing line between expansion and contraction for this series is 0.0, so the February reading is indicative of expansion, albeit at a slower pace than the prior month.
  • The key takeaway from the report is that new order activity decreased from January while the prices paid index and prices received index both increased from January.

—

Originally Posted February 20, 2025 – A “can’t miss” strategy

(Editor’s note: The original version mistakenly cited March for the next nonfarm payrolls report when it should have said February. That mistake has been corrected.)