February has been a big problem for the stock market in recent years. The table below shows the $SPX results for February going back to 2002.
The full track record, including 2023, is now available on our website. The information for 2023 is going to be presented in this article. 2023 was a profitable year for our recommendations, with an average gain at an annual rate of 13.8% – slightly above our 32-year average rate of 12.2%.
Join Larry McMillan as he discusses the current state of the stock market on January 22, 2024.
Stocks continue to plow higher, with most major indices making new highs for 2023 just as the year is coming to an end. Furthermore, $SPX is just a short distance from its all-time highs, set in January 2022, so new all-time highs seem certain to be attained early in 2024.
There was finally a correction of sorts this week, as some late afternoon selling on December 20th ballooned into a 70-point decline in a matter of less than two hours. Considering that the market had been more or less straight up for days even weeks and it was thus quite overbought, it was not a total surprise to see something of that nature.
The title of this article is a question that seems to be asked in many places recently. We have written about this in the past, and our intention in this article is not to re-hash previous discussions. Rather, in this article, we’ll document periods of time where $VIX got low and stayed low for a long while.
We have been trading this seasonal spread annually every year since 1994, except for 1995. Last year, we were stopped out, but still with a gain.
