The pace of the stock market’s rise as it continues a bounce off the June lows is nearing a magnitude that’s preceded “huge” moves in the past. The dilemma for investors is that those moves can be in “either direction,” analysts at Jefferies observed in a weekend note. Through Friday, the S&P 500
SPX,
+0.30%
has bounced more than 13% off its 2022 closing low of 3,666.77, set on June 16. While the S&P 500 remains in a bear market, having tumbled more than 20% from its Jan. 3 record close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+0.39%
was on track Monday to exit a market correction if it finishes above 32,877.66, while the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
+0.43%
had briefly traded above the threshold — 12,775.32 — that would mark its exit from a brutal bear market.
Read: Why the U.S. stock rally looks more like a new bull market than a bear bounce to these analysts But it’s the large-cap benchmark S&P 500’s more-than-7% rise over the past four weeks that is “dangerously close to extremely interesting from a signal perspective,” wrote Jefferies strategists, including Andrew Greenebaum, in a Sunday note. A rise of just more than 8% over four weeks would mark a two-standard deviation for S&P 500 rallies, they observed, based on data going back to 1990, which means the market won’t need “much more juice” to hit statistically significant territory. And in the 17 times the S&P 500 has hit that threshold, the subsequent performance “looks massive,” they wrote, averaging 9% over the next six months. But there’s a notable caveat in that there were also several instances that saw double-digit negative returns. And when the prior six months were negative — as would be the case this time around — “the likelihood of positive returns drops precipitously,” they wrote (see chart and table below).
Jefferies
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