February 5, 2018

|Daniel A. White

It’s been a crazy stock market run to start 2018, hasn’t it?

Consider this – the S&P 500 set new record highs on nearly half of the trading days in January.

There’s a technical indicator called a Bollinger Band, which is a metric investors can use to “identify extreme short-term prices in a security,” through the lens of market volatility, per Investopedia.

Recent data shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average spent an entire quarter above its upper band. That means there is a lot of enthusiasm in the market.

And it should come as no surprise that estimates for 2018 call for big growth. One analyst, Howard Silverblatt, said there could be 25 percent earnings growth, which would skyrocket returns. And it’s hard to argue, when you look at the results to begin 2018:

When everything is “blue skies” though, it makes me think the storm is around the corner. But, this time I’m tempering that expectation because the economy feels like it’s strengthening.

That said, some forces can deter growth – namely the Federal Reserve. However, Fed policy has a lagging effect, so there wouldn’t be any tangible results until probably 2019.

Until then, long may the growth continue.