The superhero S&P 500 added 3.4%. This means it’s 0.4% in the black for the year so far.
And here we were at Notes fretting over the recent dramatic spike in insider selling, the role of short covering in pushing stocks higher and the government’s funny games. In fact, so horribly emasculated did we become that we even wimpishly fretted over the lessons of history.
We recalled the Nasdaq crash of 2000 to 2002. It spawned two “healthy” rallies it spawned – one of 30.8% and one of 44.7% – before continued selling pressure took the market down to even greater lows. We also remembered the poor old Nikkei Index. Starting in 1990, it showed three very “healthy” rallies of 55%, 51.7% and 131% before collapsing and setting new lows.

And if you take a look at the chart above, you can see that during the Great Depression, the Dow saw no less than eight double-digit percentage-point rallies between 1929 and 1932 – a period when the index lost 90% of its value.