Everything in Markets Is Now Moving Incredibly Fast

Joe Weisenthal (0:00)

Hey, Odd Lots listeners, the Odd Lots tour continues and our next stop is in Chicago.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

That's right, Joe and I will be at the City Winery Chicago on October 15th for a live Odd Lots recording. Tickets are on sale now at bloomberg.com/oddlots.

Joe Weisenthal (0:14)

And of course, a special thank you to Barclays for supporting Odd Lots Live.

Tracy Alloway (0:19)

So that's October 15th at City Winery in Chicago. Get your tickets now.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Joe Weisenthal (0:42)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:48)

Tracy, this, it dawned on me the other day.

The market's kind of crazy right now. No, no, it's like seriously, it's like we're sort of used to all this stuff and everything in that. And then one day, one moment, I realized markets are really crazy these days.

Tracy Alloway (1:03)

I would say weird. I find them very weird at the moment with like the biggest tension being what's happening in the bond market and the stock market. By the way, I have a huge caveat for this episode, which is we're recording this on September 29th.

I've been away for the past week on vacation. I probably should have put up my like normal going on vacation warnings if something is about to blow up. Turns out it was the bond market.

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

Yeah.

Actually, it's funny you say that because the way I think about the market right now is so much is happening and nothing is happening. In the specific sense that it's like, okay, we're in the middle of a war with Iran. And so many we're just like, oh, it's just this headline. Trump says negotiations are going good. Trump and then it's like people move on. There's some crazy model leap, etc. by one of the AI companies. Huge news, but also so regularly cadence now that even that almost becomes noise. Obviously, the movement's in the bond market, I guess.

That is probably the one thing that does feel novel about maybe just the last few weeks. But even there, a lot of that angst has been going around a long time. So it's like, there's so much of everything. There's nothing, there's no one thing that just, you know, I was thinking, like yesterday, September 28, it was announced that David Zervos was going from Jeffrey's to...

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

I saw that. I was in Connecticut with no electricity, and even I saw that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:27)

Ten years ago, if that is announced, that would be like a really big thing people talk about. People would have been, all this stuff, and it barely broke through. But that would have been a time where that would have been the biggest sort of market-related or Wall Street-related story of the day.

Tracy Alloway (2:42)

It feels like stock markets are sort of overwhelmed and or inured to everything happening except trying to make money.

Joe Weisenthal (2:50)

No.

Tracy Alloway (2:51)

Like that is the one impulse that remains. That never gets old.

Joe Weisenthal (2:54)

No, and that's arguably the point of the whole thing. Anyway, we need like a sort of big rambling state of the market episode. And we really do have the perfect guest, someone who used to be our colleague here at Bloomberg. We are of course speaking to Luke Kawa, head of markets at Sherwood News. Luke, thank you for coming back on Odd Lots.

Luke Kawa (3:13)

Oh, great to be here. Thanks for having me, y'all.

Joe Weisenthal (3:14)

Let me start on something niche actually, because there's so much going on. Suddenly, lately, market's having a great year. S&P up over 12% or about that as the time I'm talking.

I see a lot of talk about breadth. This is, everyone's talking about market breadth these days. What's that all about?

Luke Kawa (3:31)

Yeah, I think why they're talking about breadth is because it's absolutely god-awful. There's been a lot of different stats to show it. You can say the average stat is XYZ below its high. Well, the S&P 500 is, as of writing about 1.5% off of its high. The one I came up with that bothered a lot of people the other day was coming into this week, the S&P 500 was 0.5% off record high and just 51.2% of stocks were above their 200 day. The last time we had that proximity to a high with that few stocks above the 200 day was literally the day after the.com bubble peak. So that gets a lot of people mad, but then you have to point out, okay, wait, breadth was also that bad in 1998, market ripped for another two years after that. So it really is a case of, and I think to unify a lot of what you were talking about in the intro, is the market inured to higher rates?