I am becoming increasingly concerned about the manic nature of this market. The latest is example is the reaction to Oracle (ORCL) earnings Tuesday afternoon. Revenue and Net Income were +12% and +8%, respectively. But there were a few wild numbers starting with a 359% increase in Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) to $455 billion. As you can see from the chart above, this is highly unusual in ORCL history. JaguarAnalytics called it a “headscratcher” on Twitter. But investors aren’t in the mood to question these numbers with ORCL shares currently up almost 30% in the premarket which would add more than $200 billion to the company’s market cap overnight. Wild!
 

Meanwhile, the BLS appears to be poised to decrease the number of jobs added through March 2025 by 911,000. In other words, the jobs market is even weaker than previously thought. As a result, Fed Futures are now pricing in an 10% chance of a 50 basis point cut next Wednesday (September 17). Of course we still have Thursday morning’s August CPI as an important data point in the Fed’s calculus.
 

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Lastly, Fidelity’s Director of Global Macro, Jurien Timmer, posted what I thought was a fascinating chart. It shows all the S&P bull and bear markets going back to 1960 with the number of components outperforming the index year over year at any given point. Currently, only 33% are which makes the current bull appear similar to the late stages of the Dot Com Bubble and Nifty 50 market.
 

(Click on image to enlarge)

The Mega Caps are driving this market higher while most everything else languishes as can be seen in the chart above comparing the performance of the Top 20 ETF (TOPT) to the Equal Weight S&P (RSP) over the last six months.

I have been starting to sniff out a top lately and these considerations only further convince me that it is close…….

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