(These are the market notes on today’s action by Mike Santoli, CNBC’s Senior Markets Commentator. See today’s video update from Mike above.) The broad market held Monday’s 1% pop, using another bout of rotation from recent winners toward less-crowded groups to hold the indexes at or just shy of record highs. It was a churning, low-momentum session, with the S & P 500 trading for a seventh day within the range left by the 2.7% drop on Oct. 10. But not unhealthy given the solid response to several earnings prompting a shift toward Old Economy names and out of some of the speculative froth pockets. Gold being pole-axed from a profoundly extended height, falling more than 5% to levels last seen … eight days ago. Gold bulls, bears and bugs alike have been aware that its angle of ascent looked unsustainable. The question is how disorderly the ultimate reversal might be, and what it might do to adjacent assets. So far, just a check back to the shortest of trend lines set by the acceleration higher in the past month. Still a good distance from even the 20-day moving average. At least Tuesday, it was other hot-money aggressive areas that slipped in tandem with gold, the BUZZ social-sentiment ETF , quantum stocks , the AI-juiced independent power names. Nothing decisive in this little selling squall, but it reveals something about the source of the recent buying flow in gold. Semis took a break, Nvidia soft again and more than 7% off its high. Apple , the defensive/laggard member of the Mag7 , has been moving inversely to Nvidia this week. This reflects the dispersion within the Mag7, present all year, which allows this segment of the market to rebalance itself over time. In the Mag7, the YTD stock returns range from essentially flat (AAPL, AMZN , TSLA ) to up 30%+ (NVDA, GOOGL ). A JP Morgan analyst’s downgrade of Goldman Sachs Tuesday has only modest impact on Goldman shares (down 0.2%) but in an unintended way serves as a shadow downgrade of JPM itself. The analyst pointed to rich valuation that already incorporates strong investment-banking growth and deregulation benefits while making share buybacks less attractive. JPM is more expensive on P/E and price-to-tangible-book-value than GS. Granted it’s got the stoutest balance sheet and a huge consumer arm, but hard to escape the richness of the stock. JPM off 1.8% on the session. Granting the healthy-seeming internal action, the Dow Industrials clicking to a new high, the equal-weighted S & P 500 outperforming and the VIX bleeding back toward the “normal” range below 18, it’s hard to argue that the market underwent a broad and deep reset in the past week-and-a-half of chop. Forward P/E for the S & P 500 and Nasdaq-100 are back to cycle highs of 23x and 28x. The tactical bull case leans heavily on seasonal flow-of-funds dynamics (hedge funds de-risked, now must re-risk; Q4 performance-chase ramp an annual tradition). Some sell-side desks arguing that the brief scare over China trade re-escalation and a few credit stress points rebuilt a wall of worry. To a degree, sure, though perhaps not a particularly tall one.
