Another type of mask

Once again on Thursday, the S&P 500's performance masked underlying weakness. The index gained more than 0.5%, yet there were more declining securities than advancing ones, and more volume flowing into those declining stocks. Of the 24 times this has triggered since 1962, 3 of them have been in just the last three weeks. See the bottom table in the July 21 post to see full results. Maybe this is a "nothing matters" market like we've seen a few times since 2009, and that would be about the only scenario for this kind of behavior to not lead to weakness.