“I’m goin’ down the road feelin’ bad
I don’t want to be treated this-a-way.” Bill Monroe, the Grateful Dead, and other musicians have performed versions of the traditional song, “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad”

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OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSION

American stock indices “in general” inspire an assortment of stories regarding them, including reasons for their past, present, and future levels and trends. Many of these descriptions and analyses regarding broad benchmarks such as the S+P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average appear relatively unique to the United States. However, economic regions and financial marketplaces around the world have increasingly intertwined during the course of globalization in recent decades, and especially during the past several years.

Therefore the directional travels (bull and bear adventures) of America’s stock marketplace increasingly have tended to parallel those of other significant advanced countries and regions. In recent years, the trends of emerging marketplace stocks “in general” increasingly have interconnected with those of leading advanced nations. Consequently, narratives and explanations regarding a broad “national” stock marketplace indicator such as the S+P 500 often involve those of equity barometers elsewhere (as well as interest rate, currency, and commodity movements).

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History underscores that across the fields of these various stock marketplace signposts, the timing of key price turns and the duration and extent (percentage distance travelled) of very important trend moves are not always exactly the same or extremely close. But they often are.

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After establishing important bottoms together in first quarter 2016 (and during the preceding price decline), the key American stock indices and those of other important advanced nations and the “overall” emerging stock marketplace have traded closely together from the directional and marketplace timing perspective. Though the bull moves since first quarter 2016 in these assorted domains did not all cover the same distance, all were very substantial. Their rallies since around the time of the November 2016 United States Presidential election were impressive. Investors and other stock owners, Wall Street, and the financial media cheered the majestic ascent. Heated advice to “buy the dip” became widespread as the S+P 500 climbed and as price declines tended to become less substantial in percentage terms.

However, the glorious bull move in American and other related stock marketplace halted in first quarter 2018. A mournful “correction”, a decline of roughly ten percent, ensued. The disturbing decline in the S+P 500 and other significant global stock marketplace indices probably will continue. However, if the S+P 500 and other equity benchmarks manage to surpass their January 2018 highs, they probably will not do so by much.

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For further economic and political analysis, see “There Will Be Blood: Financial Battlefields” (2/9/18), “Busload of Faith: Financial Marketplaces” (1/15/18), “Marketplace Vehicles: Going Mobile” (12/13/17), “History on Stage: Marketplace Scenes” (8/9/17), and other essays.

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Global Stock Marketplaces- Winter of Discontent (3-5-18)