Blog/S&P 500 Posted May 12, 2016 by Martin Armstrong QUESTION: Everyone in the gold industry says you are wrong. The stock market will crash by 90% and gold will soar. Will you address that scenario just once? ANSWER: I have answered this frivolous question countless times. This is the most bearish rally in stocks ever. That is why the stock market has kept rising. The shorts always have to buy back. Just look at the big hedge funds. Their performance has declined markedly because they have taken that typical view. I displayed how the velocity of money peaked in 1998 and has been in a bear market ever since. Naturally, people believe what they want to believe and ignore anything that shows them to be wrong. Well, now look that the annual accumulative trading volume in the S&P 500; it too peaked in 1996. Volume finally bottomed in 2014 and is, at last, edging up. We expected this to turn upward in 2015 as this was also 86 years from 1929 (8.6 * 10). https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/...eclines-as-hoarding-rises-due-to-uncertainty/
Either the logic is poor. Or the evidences are weak. But I am not impressed at all. This guy thinks it's the trapped bears that fuel the rally. Lol ... Losers can help to define the path of least resistance, But they can't game the game, or even the general conditions. I don't see his bear market since 1998 ... We make all time high. Uh ... Don't get how he came about his volume expectation ... Anyway. What's the link with the price ? The next century ? I am sure he loses money. With such a logic and fantasy. However I agree that peoples look for confirmation, Where they should weight it with the refutations. That's the only piece of wisdom I get from it. So you'll be welcome to criticize him / me.
I don't get that chart, not sure what information he's using or if it's deliberately misleading. Is that S&P 500 components combined volume? S&P volume is not not down from 1996 either. Armstrong is delusional, why does this guy still get to be heard as if he matters.
That's a misleading statistic then. The number of horses on roads is way down - we have a transportation crisis!
On the other hand, the vertical axis in his graph is labeled millions of shares traded. It would be nice to get a confirmation of what total yearly volume on all venues for sp500 companies was. Also a lot of trading moved to ETFs. Hard to draw conclusions.
One good method would be to sum S&P 500 component volumes and average daily totals. They'd probably be down from 2008 but definitely higher than 1996.
Also shorts can't effect the long term price of the index. They had to "sell" first. Meaning they "Suppressed" demand on entry and added to demand on exit. Their net effect is always zero. Shorts "can" effect short term prices but when prices rises due to short squeezes they induce additional supply into the market and price returns back to where it started. The only thing that can drive the index up over time is long shareholders who "don't" sell. Because they created demand on the entry and removed supply from the market by holding their shares. This is what ultimately creates long term returns.
I just did a similar study with the data I have. I created an "index" made of top 100 liquid companies listed on NYSE and NASDAQ. The index is refreshed every month. It is survivor bias free as I have data for all delisted companies. I printed every day the total share volume in millions of shares and total dollar volume in millions of $ (approximated as volume for the day * close) in the index components. I then plotted a 252 rolling window sum of the above. Indeed the share volume seems to be back to the numbers seen in 1998 but the dollar volume is higher as the avg share price is almost double what it was back then. It's true a dollar today does not buy what it used to buy in 1998 but adjusting for that is a different story.
Armstrong has a movie out. The movie is called the forecaster. He claims he was jailed for refusing to provide his secretive forecasting algo to the government. he was held in Jail for quite some time and held onto his secretive algo. He currently has a seminar later this year for 5k a person. Maybe his algo has similar properties to Mcdonald's secret sauce. I waive the bullshit flag on this one.