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As you can see, with the decline today, stocks gave back nearly all of the gains from last Wednesday. The downtrend on the year remains intact. So does the low from June.
Let's talk about that low.
The June bottom in stocks was marked by the European Central Bank's flip flop on bond buying (i.e. quantitative easing, QE). Just weeks after the ECB announced they would end QE, they had to restart QE — to backstop the sovereign bond markets of the fiscally fragile eurozone countries (QE by a new name, the "Transmission Protection Instrument").
Two days later, the Bank of Japan doubled down on their bond buying program (holding the line on their ultra-easy policy and unlimited QE via their yield curve control strategy).
So the Fed was raising rates and beginning quantitative tightening (extracting liquidity) back in June, which created shock waves in global markets. But the shock waves were quickly absorbed as two major central banks dug in — positioning to defend global markets from shocks (i.e. QE). That was the bottom for stocks. And that still holds.
If there's one thing we've learned from the events of the past decade, it's that global central banks will do, in coordination, "whatever it takes" to preserve stability.
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