Don’t get comfortable with the global stock rally today: Goldman’s Panic Index is approaching ‘max fear’
S&P 500 futures were flat this morning after the index closed up strongly on Friday by 1.97%. Markets in Asia and Europe were strongly up this morning. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.27% in early trading; Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 3.89%; and South Korea’s KOSPI was up 4.1%. Even gold is now back above $5,000.
It would be nice to think that this is the start of a sustained global rally in equities.
But don’t get too comfortable: The S&P has been a rollercoaster all year and Wall Street analysts don’t expect it to end anytime soon. Every time stocks take a step back in reaction to bad news, a relentless wave of buy-the-dippers has sent them back upward again. And every time stocks have rallied, an equally relentless wave of skeptics has pared those gains.
The shape of this chart of the year-to-date performance of the index tells you all you need to know:
Unsurprisingly, the VIX “fear” index (which measures volatility) has also been on the rise all year:
Gold is supposed to be a safe haven, but anyone who bought it at the end of January was stung by it:
And the Goldman Sachs “Panic Index”—yes, that’s a real thing—hit 9.22 out of 10 on Thursday, indicating “max fear” among investors, according to Bloomberg.
This “violent volatility” is being driven by investors who want to get out of software stocks—which they believe are vulnerable to being replaced by AI agents—and into almost any other industrial sector, according to Deutsche Bank.
The software companies in the S&P 500 fell by 7.75% last week and are down 15% over the last two weeks, Jim Reid and his team at Deutsche Bank told clients this morning. “The Magnificent 7 also endured their worst week since last April, falling -4.66% (+0.45% Friday) with Amazon down -5.55% on Friday.”
Yet the S&P remains less than 1% from its all time high.
You can see that rotation in this chart, which compares the S&P 500 to a notional “equal-weight” index, which ignores each company’s market cap in order to treat all stocks equally. The real-world S&P is being held back by the decline of tech stocks, but all the other stocks in the index are doing quite well:
“The equal-weighted S&P 500 even hit a fresh record, rising +2.13% (+1.88% Friday), underscoring how widespread the rotation trade has become,” Reid et al said.
The Dow Jones Industrials—which are also less swayed by tech stocks than the S&P—closed above 50,000 for the first time ever last week. Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research was pretty happy about that. “We are still forecasting DJIA at 70,000 by the end of the Roaring 2020s,” he told clients in a recent note.
Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:
- S&P 500 futures were flat this morning. The last session closed up 1.97%.
- STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.27% in early trading.
- The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.25% in early trading.
- Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 3.89%.
- China’s CSI 300 was up 1.63%.
- The South Korea KOSPI was up 4.1%.
- India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.68%.
- Bitcoin was at $69.5K.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com