Guarantees, no. Trends, probably.

Experienced stock market investor or not, the stock market surely provides no certainty as to what exactly lies ahead. If there was certainty, the percentage of Americans (65%) investing in stocks would be much higher. The markets can be inherently volatile and unpredictable, influenced by economic shifts, geopolitical events, and company-specific developments.

It seems pretty common, too, to see the market painted in a polarizing manner - either “the market is skyrocketing towards all-time highs!” or “the stock market lost $15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 today!” Hyperbole at it’s absolute finest.

There are no guarantees when investing in stocks. But this is the exact thing that creates the reward (capital gains). Guaranteed outcomes reduce or eliminate rewards. What we are left with, then, the difference between guaranteed outcomes and non-guaranteed outcomes, is risk. You (potentially) get rewarded for taking on risk.

But the markets are not black and white. While news surrounding the markets tends to be all-encompassing, and paint the market broadly as positive or negative, we could instead look deeper, inside of the market at trends and patterns. We call this “technical analysis” (TA) in the market research world: scrutinizing current and past market data. Various types of TA are used in gauging the future direction of the markets.

My investment methodology revolves around relative strength and Point & Figure charting - comparing asset classes, broad-market indicators and even individual stocks against each other. It helps show which asset class is hot or cold, which parts of the market are seeing growth and which are not, and which stocks are riding extra high (or extra low) on momentum from those hot/cold patches. It’s much like viewing a scene through a thermal lens.

Here are some trends and indicators that I’ve seen in the last week that do well to provide context to the current market environment:

• Small-cap stocks (Russell 2000 Index: RUT) sit 17% above their 2025 lows (April), though still down 9% year-to-date (YTD), and on 4 consecutive buy signals, and broke its overhead resistance line

• The percentage of stocks in the S&P 500 in a positive trend is now at 50%, a level at which we see most of the market’s positive returns, after declining to the treacherous 30% mark in April - this is a positive long-term signal

• 7-day and 30-day returns across both domestic and international indices are strongly positive:

  • Russell 2000: +2.6% / +15.1%

  • Dow Jones Industrial Average: +1.5% / +9.9%

  • S&P 500: +1.1% / 13.7%

  • Nasdaq-100: +1.4% / +17.4%

  • International Emerging Markets: +2% / +15.8%

  • International Developed Markets: +1.3% / +17.3%

• Cryptocurrency also on positive trend, +5.4% in the last 7 days, and +33.3% in the last 30 days

Until next week! Thanks for reading!