The stock market took center stage last week thanks to a borderline obsessive market focus on NVIDIA’s earnings release. Its “beat” was good enough to fuel the single largest 1-day gain in market capitalization ever recorded for a public company. There is much to say about the stock market’s behavior, and today’s graph looks at it through a macro lens. This chart can be found in Chapter 4 of the Macro Specialist Designation curriculum, which focuses on leading economic indicators. With the Conference Board – guardian of *the* definitive LEI index – saying it no longer expects a recession in 2024, we’ll be paying more attention to its constituent data, including this week’s ISM Manufacturing survey for February. New Orders have tracked the S&P 500’s performance closely over the decades. A further increase in that subindex would lend some credence to the equity rally we’ve seen to date. If, however, the January spike was a one-off, stocks will look increasingly like an outlier compared to other LEIs like the yield curve and the average hourly workweek, which continue to point to rough waters ahead.

The Macro Week In Review

What We Read This Weekend

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