Market On Open - Tuesday 2 January 2024

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Forget Everything You Knew

There's no particular reason that securities prices should reflect calendar years, save for one very big reason. Which is year-end fund performance fees and individual bonus awards. For this reason 31 December is a high pressure date, and 1 January is a whole new world. End of 2021, market on the moon; end of 2022, market at the gates of Hades; end of 2023, moonage once more. It's almost as if stock prices are unrelated to reality and instead reflect supply and demand of the securities themselves.

So, at the end of December last year, 2023 that is, all of us who followed price not narrative - meaning, who followed the market as it actually was, rather than as how it was portrayed - can give ourselves a giant slap on the back.

But that was last year. And now it's this year. 2024. And so it all begins again.

Today is the first trading day of the new year; we need to view our charts and analysis afresh with no regard to what we thought would happen into 2023 year end and whether that did or did not happen. Now we are sailing towards the bigs' 31 December 2024 fund performance fees, and we have all the usual navigation points to handle along the way - quarterly opex events, FOMC decisions, inflation, GDP, oh also a Presidential election.

Welcome back folks!

Let's look with open eyes then at our usual charts covering the main US equity indices, associated leveraged ETFs, plus the SOXL TECL and FNGU ETFs as always.

Note - to open full-page versions of these charts, just click on the chart headings, which are hyperlinks.