Business owners see less upside

The latest NFIB survey of small business owners showed a big drop in their expectations for general business conditions. For the first time in years, it dropped below zero, meaning more think conditions are getting worse than better.

This ended a streak of nearly 50 months with net positive expectations. The elections in 2016 and 2020 clearly had an impact here.

We might assume that if business owners have flipped to pessimistic, then we might expect small-cap stocks to struggle going forward. Didn't really happen that way.

It was even less of a negative for the S&P 500. There are definite reasons to be concerned here, but this survey doesn't seem to be one of them.