Bear Case Requires Downtrend Action. Strong Bull Bias Otherwise.With the recent breaks the odds are strongly towards 5500 hitting and if that breaks the odds are greatly for far lower hitting but I want to take some time to make sure I am clear on the binary nature of where we are.
The market is in a "Might go up, might go down" spot. Probably won't go sideways for long. I think we're probably going to see strong trends coming out of whatever decision is made here.
First thing I want to really drill in for my bear friends is a sell off from the 86 means nothing at all. Most of the time this is a bear trap. We have broken the first level it may have bottomed so the bias is strongly towards the next ones hitting but having a strong bear bias at this point in historic SPX setup would have led you into a lot of trouble most of the time.
If you fade trends the thing you always have to be worrying about is you've got this "pretty much" right but you're actually one swing too early. Because when that happens, the last swing is always exceptionally strong.
Fading trends is hard because if you're wrong it trends against you and if you're 95% right it spikes against you in the most ruthless of ways. What makes this all the worse is that comes off a correction in the trend so you end up with a bigger zone in which you're wrong. For example if we began to rally here there's now about 4% extra you could be wrong while saying we're still inside the last high.
Any time you're fading a trend and it's going well you should think of this risk. You have to map in the risk of a 161 head fake. These happen a lot. A common thing in blow offs. If you're right about the reversal after this move the short will be easy - but it's not easy to take if you're short bias into it.
Given the broader context of everything, I don't think I favour the 1.61 head-fake being the outcome if we rally. If we rally again then we're seeing prolonged big chart trending action above the macro 4.23 and I've only ever seen trends getting stronger when they can break a 4.23.
If the 1.61 breaks we can end up at the 4.23 - which would be a monster move.
The instance of a 4.23 hitting from a 50% crash are extremely rare. Every instance of it there has been in indices has led to a massive trend decision. All instances of bubbles tend to have clear changes in their momentum when breaking 4.23 fibs.
SPX is already above the 4.23 fib. The bear thesis has it this is a head-fake of that. It needs to be evidenced by a strong rejection of the head-fake.
Earlier I mentioned the tendency of 1.61 head-fakes. This was the most recurring big obvious topping signal I found when looking at crashes. We'd usually dummy drop and then make a 1.61 spike out. This is the rule I use to tell a pending false breakout from a breakout. If it breaks the 1.61, I expect it will get at least very close to the 2.20. If it can not break the 1.61, then there's a strong chance it may be topping.
Our current top is on the 1.61 hit and we're now into a retest of that.
The 1.61 sell off is interesting because if it's a 4.23 reversal we have to be in a head fake above it and if it's a head fake we are looking for a 1.61 spike. These things make the speculative bets into the retest compelling and the pragmatic "What if" planning for a break worth covering. A 1.61 reversal would be expected to be a nasty event.
A 1.61 reversal would take out the last low (by definition, it's just a bit pullback otherwise) and it would do this in a strong consistent selling manner.
Which would be crash like on this timeframe.
But the 1.61 reaction is not in any way prescriptive of a crash at this point. A common pattern is a big pullback from the 1.61 and then when it has been broken again it goes into a strong rally to the following fibs. This can top on a few of the fibs but full extensions in strong trends spike out 4.23.
Inside the context of the overall building of the trend what is happening now would be insignificant overall. Even if dropping all the way to 5500. A full expansion of this would agree with the other fibs we had around the 10,000 level. Furthermore, a doubling period off the breakout of a 4.23 I'd consider to be a highly probable outcome.
If the bear thesis is wrong here it can be wrong in a way that is irrecoverable. A persist bear will get you slaughtered.
The case for a potential bear move here is extremely strong but that does also tend to mean the failure of it would be all the more spectacular. It makes a lot of sense to bet in these zones because there's a high chance you can at least break even on short term reactions and can perhaps make a lot in bigger reversals.
It's pragmatic to be aware of what the larger risks of a reversal would be and how the swings in that would likely form. You have to think about these things ahead of time because otherwise it all happens too fast to really have time to think. Impulse decisions are usually bad.
I have a high degree of confidence in the fibs being able to map out the important levels. My ability to know what that means ... not so much. I may or may not get it right.
What is highly likely to be right based on 100 yrs of swings in SPX is the next major swing will relate to a previous swing in such a way that fib levels make it possible to get a good idea of the major highs/lows of the move. All the ways we can do that from here imply massive moves. If it's not 50% off the high it's 100% from the 4.23 break.
How all this relates to where we are at this moment in time is we have to accept the potential of the bear bet being so wrong that even if there's a crash later it comes back to this price - meaning if it doesn't work here- entirely drop it and aggressively trend follow. If the bear bet is right we have to be inside of a 1.61 head fake of a 4.23.
If we're inside of a head fake is has to sell off very consistently. We crash back to the break level. Price "Isn't meant" to be above that level and when the brief flurry is over it's nothing but selling.
The consistency with which this style of rejection has is uncommon so it was really weird seeing it off the first 1.61 reaction. For the rejection thesis to be valid now the pullback in is we should be in the second trend leg which will complete the return to 4.23. If it's the second trend leg it can't be weaker than the first. The first was extremely consistent.
From my perspective that's the bear bet. It's really specific for me at this point. If the bear thesis is going to be good we're inside a 1.61 head fake. The 1.61 is retesting and when it is rejected for a second time we're into a strong downmove to where the false breakout started.
What it would take from the prices we currently are to turn me into a hyper raving bull that was discussing different bubble moves that may be about to build up is not a lot at this point. It would take very little to convince me to start to buy all the dips with tight stops and it'd not take all that much longer of that working for me to say it was extremely likely all the implied bear risk was behind us and it's all rockets and emojis for the next two years.
I think when it comes to what the next big swings will be in markets it's important to be very objective because it's wild just how easily juxtaposed ideas can make sense. For example, AI. One could make a bulletproof case that we should expect a productivity boom based on AI. Lots of people can do much more. But you can make the inverse forecast that AI will be deflationary. Bringing prices down. Creating job losses. As jobs are lost, less money is spent - especially if things are deflationary because you can buy it cheaper later. Less money being spent is less business income and more jobs lost. Companies that survived would likely main use AI and it's easy to see how all that could end up being bad for markets.
There are a lot of things like could go either way like that and have polarised reactions in the market but something related to AI is almost certainly going to happen. If AI advancements don't stall out rapidly they're going to start making real changes in the things happening in the world - this could easily justify a bubble or it could put prices into a race to zero.
Then there's weird things like what happens when AIs become more and more of the trading volume - surely that's coming ... right? What will they do? It's something you can again make binary extreme cases for. You could make a case that the AIs would notice patterns of a topping market and start to trade in a way that brought about a crash. Or you could argue AIs might start to engage in some form of reward hacking and the way to optimise success is to drive the market vertical.
I don't really see the point in narrative based analysis but if you do a thought experiment where you imagine the market either has crashed or has doubled rapidly it's now easier than it ever has been to find different viable ways you could work backwards to how events complimented that.
It's wise to be agnostic and evidence based while we're at such a big decision level because the potential to be wrong big is so great and the likelihood you'll be bluffed into thinking you're right just at the worst moment is so high. Maybe bulls have had that now. But even if we sell and make a new low, this may turn out to be a second leg of a bear trap and be the low- being wrong from there as a bear would be even worse. Runs to new highs could come before a crash.
If and when the decision is made it should be easy to make money. The 4.23 break would be far better to make money. The trend lasting over a year. A bear break would be trickier with the ups and downs of a bear market but lucrative for the correct strategies. The important thing is being equally acceptant of either outcome - and also accept the reality that neither of the implied outcomes may happen. Which would be a huge anti-climax for me. Really would. If whatever happens next is vanilla, I'd feel a bit cheated.
The 4.23 rejection off a 1.61 spike out would be a very exceptional thing. It should be evidenced by exceptional action.
If the bear trend is not persistent, there's a good chance it's not working. Up-trending through the resistance levels would make the bear case indefensible in my opinion and in the event of a typical 4.23 break make being bear bias into the future certain to fail no matter how good you are at it.
The down move has a lot of proving it to do yet before it crosses from an expected move in a bullish pullback to a real threat of a trend break.
At this point both would look exactly the same - what we see in the coming week is likely to be more telling.
