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Stocks are skipping the ‘Santa Claus rally’ again this year. That doesn’t bode well for January.
Santa Claus is leaving investors in the lurch once again in 2024 as U.S. stocks have struggled during the typically bullish home stretch of the year.
Every year, investors look forward to the “Santa Claus rally,” a period that encompasses the final five trading days of December and the first two trading days of the new year. Since 1950, the S&P 500 SPX has gained, on average, 1.3% during this stretch, while finishing higher nearly 80% of the time, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
But in 2024, investors look set to be disappointed for the second year in a row. As of Monday’s close, the S&P 500 has fallen 1.1% since the Santa rally period began on Christmas Eve, Dow Jones data show.
As a result, the index is on track for its worst performance during the typically bullish seasonal window since the period that straddled the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Back-to-back declines during this stretch are pretty rare, historically speaking; this would be the first since the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 periods. Prior to that, it only happened one other time going back to 1950, per Dow Jones data.
The weak start to the Santa rally period, coupled with a handful of other developments, has prompted some analysts to warn that stocks could continue to struggle into January.
Weakness hasn’t been confined to the S&P 500. In fact, for the Nasdaq Composite COMP, the situation has been even more dire. The tech-heavy index is on track to decline for its fourth consecutive Santa Claus rally period — what would be its longest such streak on record.
To be sure, both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are still sitting on massive gains for 2024. Even the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA has tallied a respectable calendar-year gain of 13%, according to FactSet data.
However, the relative lack of market turbulence this year is all the more reason to worry that the latest wave of selling pressure could be a prelude to something bigger. Since the beginning of December, stocks of all sizes and styles have struggled, apart from shares of a few megacap companies that have increasingly dominated the market.
The result has been a sharp deterioration in stock-market breadth, defined as the number of U.S.-listed stocks climbing relative to the number falling. For the S&P 500, a stretch of negative breadth lasted 14 days earlier this month, the longest such streak since at least late 1999, Dow Jones data show.
Despite the weakness under the surface, gains for a handful of megacap tech stocks like Broadcom Inc. AVGO and Tesla Inc. TSLA have largely spared the S&P 500 and Nasdaq from steeper declines. The Nasdaq was even clinging to a narrow month-to-date gain as of Monday’s close.
But over the past few days, even these stocks have started to turn over.
That the S&P 500’s rebound from its sharp post-Federal-Reserve-meeting selloff has apparently stalled out doesn’t bode well for the market’s near-term outlook, according to Tom Essaye, founder and president of Sevens Report Research. He described this as a concerning technical development in a report shared with MarketWatch on Monday.
Meanwhile, in a report shared with MarketWatch over the weekend, BTIG technical strategist Jonathan Krinsky pointed out that the momentum trade that had powered the market higher in 2024 has recently shown signs of rolling over, which could spell trouble during the weeks ahead.
As of Friday, only 58% of S&P 500 stocks were trading above their 200-day moving average, the weakest reading all year, Krinsky said. That ended a 265-trading-day streak north of 60%, the longest since late 2021.
At the same time, high-beta momentum stocks — that is, the most volatile stocks — have broken their uptrend. And one popular technical signpost, the moving-average convergence-divergence indicator, issued a weekly sell signal for the S&P 500 at the end of last week, its first since September.
Individually, none of these indicators carries much weight. But taken together, they could signal that investors haven’t yet finished taking their chips off the table.
December would be only the second month this year when the S&P 500 has declined, after April. Apart from one short-lived panic in August that sent the Cboe Volatility Index VIX soaring to a four-year high, the market has been remarkably stable in 2024.
“The fact that the rally was rejected from the prior support trendline is not great, and while there are still four days left in the [Santa Claus rally] period, we remain concerned about a bigger January decline, and perhaps so are investors given the Friday selling,” Krinsky said.
Contacted by MarketWatch on Monday, Krinsky said that the ongoing weakness in the market on Monday simply underscored his point from this weekend’s note. Krinsky surmised that some of the selling pressure could be investors front-running expected profit-taking of this year’s winners come January.
Many Wall Street strategists have blamed rising Treasury yields for the market’s December struggles. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y touched its highest level in more than seven months on Friday as stocks slumped.
But the weakness in stocks persisted on Monday, even as yields turned lower. The S&P 500 ended down 1.1% at 5,907, though it was still above its lows from earlier in the month.
But the fact that the index has yet to reclaim 6,000 was making technical strategists, including Krinsky, wary. The former support level appeared to be turning into a ceiling, Krinsky noted.
If that turns out to be true, it could be a while before the S&P 500 marches back to record highs after tallying 57 record closes in 2024, according to Dow Jones data.
The Nasdaq Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average were also in the red Monday, although both pared their losses from earlier in the session. The Nasdaq ended down 1.2%, while the Dow was off by about 420 points, or 1%, at 42,574.