The Market Has Never Done This Before

A fascinating statistic about the current no-vol state of the market, courtesy of Deutsche’s Jim Reid, who points out that the last time we had 13 consecutive days in which the S&P moved less than 0.3% in either direction was… never:

… all you really need to know about markets at the moment is that yesterday’s move in the S&P 500 (+0.16%) added to the record daily run of less than 0.3% moves in either direction. It’s now 13 days since we had a larger move using daily data back to 1927. The second longest streak of this length was of 10 days which has happened twice in history. The most recent time was in England’s solitary football World Cup winning year (06 Jan 1966 – 19 Jan 1966), and the other between 15 Nov 1961 and 29 Nov 1961. So these continue to be remarkable financial times we are living through.

Visually:

Another way of showing the above is with the S&P’s closing prints over the same period: 2474, 2473, 2473, 2470, 2477, 2478, 2475, 2472, 2470, 2476, 2478, 2472, 2477, 2481

And here is some more from Reid:

To put the steady but relentless rally in the S&P in context, it is now 73 trading days since the S&P increased by more than 1% in any one day. Give it another 7 days and we will beat the prior record set back in November 06 and March 07. Although, given the current lull in the activity (VIX now back to below 10), we might even get close to the 100 day record set back in mid-July 1995 to early Dec 1995.

Finally, this from BofA:

Earlier this year, the Dow recorded its lowest one-month trading range since 1900, and last summer the S&P traded within a 1.77% range for 42 consecutive days, the tightest such streak in history (the lull was ultimately broken on 9-Sep-16, when the S&P 500 dropped 2.45% on ECB policy, North Korea, and a fear of higher rates in the US).

This is just another piece of evidence for Canaccord’s thesis that traders are not complacent, they are simply “paralyzed.”