Summary
It’s happening again. The stock market is bending but not breaking. After a weak opening on Monday, stocks started recovering around noon as bond yields subsided. While the S&P 500 (SPX) was able to finish flat, the Nasdaq dropped 0.4%, the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) fell 0.3%, and the Information Technology sector gave back 0.7%. Unfortunately, after the 10-year yield dropped from 4.8% to 4.77% midday, yields went right back up to the highs for the day. If we look at the stocks in both the SPX and QQQ over the past week, some of the biggest 2024 winners are getting hit the hardest — with many down from 4% to 16%. We wrote about the market hanging in there until the end of the year as investors wanted to wait until 2025 to sell their big winners and put off paying capital-gains tax. We thought that tax-selling decisions should not be part of a selling rationale. And some indeed are paying the price! Vickers Stock Research, a sister company of Argus Research, publishes the Weekly Insider Report, detailing trends in insider sentiment. Vickers one-week sell/buy ratio for the Nasdaq moved into negative territory last week — and in a manner that calls for some attention. The ratio is now an eye-popping 15.57 compared to 4.54 the week before, this on a scale where any reading abo