“I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” – Theodore Roosevelt

After a lower start overnight, futures have slowly picked up steam this morning and are now in modestly positive territory across the board with the Nasdaq leading the way higher. Overnight, economic data in Asia was on the weak side with China’s Services PMI missing expectations while Japan’s index of Leading Indicators decelerated relative to December.

Here in the US today, the only economic report on the calendar is Consumer Credit at 3 PM Eastern. On the earnings front, key reports after the close today include Amgen (AMGN), Tenet Healthcare (THC), and Simon Properties (SPG).

If you talk to just about any investor lately, they’ll tell you that it has been a difficult year in the market. Putting the recent moves into perspective, it could have been a lot worse. Friday’s close marked 23 trading days since the S&P 500’s last closing record high, and during that span, the S&P 500 is down 6.2%. When comparing the last 23 trading days to other 23 trading day periods since 2000, there have been plenty of periods where the market saw much larger declines. Prior to the current period, the last time the S&P 500 declined 6% over a 23 trading day period was in late September 2020, but six months before that we saw what was the largest decline in a 23 trading day period since the Great Depression when the S&P 500 lost more than a third of its value from its peak on 2/19/20 to its low on 3/23/20.