SPX: It's All About Perspective...👀

April 6 @ 11:30 am ET

A reminder from this post that 2625 and 2585 are important near/long-term support/resistance levels for the SPX...and that if 2585 failed to hold, a retest of 2460 was long overdue...or even an eventual decline to 2220...

April 6 @ 2:35 am ET

* UPDATE at today's close...today's low is a fraction above 2585...

Today's low is a fraction above 2585

As we've witnessed over the past months, the Fed's former "plunge-protection" program has been replaced by its rate-hiking policy and discontinued bond-buying program. This factor, combined with:

• political uncertainty tied to the November mid-term Congressional election,
• President Trump's tweets/threats of tariffs on billions of dollars worth of goods from China, and
• today's comments from Secretary-Treasurer, Steve Mnuchin, "Well I didn't say it's not the beginning of one, I said that we're actually not in a trade war...but there is the potential of a trade war."

means that we will see volatility remain elevated throughout the year (as I had warned in my 2018 Market Forecast for 2018). No doubt, these factors (uncertainty about tariffs, rising interest rates/borrowing costs, and the potential for worse political gridlock) will place headwinds on businesses in determining wages, hiring, expansions, mergers & acquisitions, etc., and will blunt, to a certain extent, economic benefits that may have materialized from the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act that was passed by Congress late last year.

Throw into this mix: 

• Mark Zuckerberg's revelation this week that most of Facebook's 2 billion users may have already been exposed to data scraping and "malicious actors," plus
• the unknown fallout/consequences that FB and also other tech/social media and app providers/websites/platforms may experience over the coming weeks from their users, advertizers, a growing list of global regulators, and those with a variety of pending and potential lawsuits,

and you've got a potential recipe for a disaster in the making.

The following 1 YR charts of the FAANGs + 5 Tech stocks that make up FNGU show the volatility they've experienced this year (on accelerating downside rate-of-change)...that's not likely to abate anytime soon.