It’s been quite a rangebound period for the S&P 500 over the last few days. Over the last 12 trading days, the spread between the S&P 500’s intraday high and low has been just 1.65% which ranks as narrower than any other period since July 2019. More recently, the upside has been especially capped. Ever since the start of June, the S&P 500 has made multiple attempts to take out its 5/7 record high, but each time it has failed. In just the last four trading days, if the S&P 500 doesn’t take out its record high today, the S&P 500 will have traded within 0.15% (0.11%, 0.14%, 0.03%, and 0.02%) of its all-time high from early May, but each time failed to take it out.

Coming up so close so often but falling short each time has to be disheartening for bulls, and it doesn’t happen particularly often either. The chart below shows streaks where the S&P 500’s intraday high came within 0.25% of an all-time but didn’t quite make it. Since intraday data for the S&P 500 begins in 1983, there have only been four other streaks of similar or longer duration. The first two were in the early 1990s, and then it wasn’t until 2016 that we saw a streak of six days. After that 2016 occurrence, there were two occurrences in the first half of 2017.