The Schizophrenic S&P 500 In Week 1 Of June 2017

For a week where there was a lot of potential for volatility to erupt in the U.S. stock market, the S&P 500 showed little sign of it.

The closing price of the S&P fell well within the range our dividend futures-based model anticipated for investors focused on the current quarter of 2017-Q2, which largely matches what other futures-based models indicate, at least with respect to the expected timing of the Fed’s next U.S. interest rate hike.

The problem with that is that the Fed will announce its intended action during the second full week of June 2017, which also contains the third Friday for the month, which means that the window for the current quarter’s dividend futures is about to close and investors will be forced to shift their attention toward other points of time in the future. What we’ve been describing as the ticking clock problem for the S&P 500 has now fully gestated.

And that’s where we’re starting to see the U.S. stock market become schizophrenic, which became noticeable on Friday, 9 June 2017, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial average (Index: DJI) hit new highs even as the Nasdaq (Index: IXIC) looked like it was going to crash after hitting an intraday high.

The S&P 500, which overlaps both major market indices, closed just slightly lower than it started the day. What we think may going on is that investors in different parts of the market are shifting their focus to different points of time in the future, with Nasdaq investors looking ahead at 2017-Q3 and Dow Jones Industrials investors looking farther forward in time to 2017-Q4. Combined, the better expectations for 2017-Q4 offset almost all of the more negative expectations associated with 2017-Q3 where the expected changes in the year over year growth rate of the S&P 500’s dividends per share are concerned.

Hopefully, this explanation answers at least one hedge fund CIO’s questions.