Last week saw the largest decline in the stock market in over a year. The stock market news that came out last week was shocking, and indicates a stock market crash could be starting now. The stock market in 2024 will not look like it did during the first 3 months of the year. The market analysis for tomorrow, and the stock market prediction for 2024 indicates a 2024 shift is starting now. The latest stock market analysis shows a stock market correction, and possibly a stock market crash, is starting now. Stock market investing will get more difficult for the rest of 2024. Multiple stock market predictions, as well as my stock market prediction for 2024, is shifting to become more bearish. When will the stock market crash? Today’s market analysis shows the 2024 stock market prediction indicating a possible stock market crash starting now.
The stock market just gave a huge warning to all investors last week that a 2024 shift is starting now. The bull market broke its stride last week, with the S&P 500’s first 2% dip in a long time. What happened last week changes the direction for the 2024 stock market, and this means we have to update our 2024 stock market predictions. Last week, the Dow posted its worst day since the March 2023 banking crisis. It was the worst day in over a year for the Dow. And the Dow also posted its worst four day drop since October as the stock market rout intensified.
The stock market did something last week that we have not seen in a long time, and you need to wake up and pay attention, because the rally that we’ve seen over the past five months is in trouble. The S&P 500 had a close below the 21 day EMA for the first time in over five months. This is an indication that bulls are starting to lose control and bears are starting to take over. Now it’s not a guarantee that the market’s going to go down. I’m not saying that. What I am saying is you need to pay attention. You need to watch out. Because some of the data that came out over the past two weeks is scary. It’s shocking. And it could cause the stock market to fall.
For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Scott Curry. I’m a former Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley investment banker, and I have over 25 years of trading experience. One thing I’ve learned over the past 25 years is that stocks do not go up in a straight line forever. They have pullbacks, they have corrections, and sometimes we even see a stock market crash. The market is long overdue for a pullback and even a correction, although not necessarily a crash since we just had one of those less than two years ago. But what you need to understand is, if we’re going to make a prediction for the stock market for the rest of 2024, we have to keep in mind this shift in market momentum that started last week.
In this video, I’m going to show you what’s happening with investor sentiment, the shift that’s happening there, how bears are starting to take over. We’re also going to talk about two very important data points that are coming out this week that are going to affect the direction of the stock market for the next three months.
Now the best way to gauge investor sentiment is with the CNN Fear and Greed Index. Fear is when investors are bearish. Greed is when investors are bullish. All year long, the CNN Fear and Greed Index has been at Extreme Greed, showing extreme investor bullishness. But last month it did fall down to 73, into the Greed stage, for the first time in many months. Then a week ago it fell all the way down to 69. And then on Friday it closed at 61 – its lowest close we’ve seen in almost five months. And during that big drop on Thursday, it dropped all the way down to 48, which was Neutral, not even bullish anymore.
And most notably, the Market Momentum fell out of Extreme Greed stage for the first time in five months, and fell down to the Greed stage. Stock Price Strength also fell down to Greed for the first time in over three months. And shockingly, Market Volatility, which is a measure of the VIX, which is how many options traders are buying put options expecting a major drop in the stock market, that just hit Extreme Fear. The VIX had its highest close since the October 2023 sell off. This is the most amount of options traders buying put options on the market in over six months. Options traders are clearly concerned about the possibility for a major drop in the stock market, even if stock buyers aren’t that concerned.
The thing about trading options, especially put options like a lot of people have done on SPX, which shows up in the VIX, is the fact that this is a great way to hedge your portfolio. So if the stock market goes down you can make a lot of money. And that’s exactly what I did on Thursday. I bought a SPX put option on Thursday at $4.20. And it ran all the way up to $95 by the end of the day. I ended up with an over 1,000% profit. I made an $11,120 profit on a $900 investment in one day. Now, if I had held this till the end of the day, it would have been over a $20,000 profit. But of course nobody’s going to perfectly time the top and bottom. But I still came out with a 1,330% profit on this trade.
If you want to make money like this in your portfolio, and make money as the market goes down, come join me in my discord. As you can see, if you make $11,000 in one trade, it only takes one trade to make up the entire cost of the discord for the next ten years. Now I’m not saying you’re going to make that money every day. I certainly do not. These kinds of trades I come across about once every three months, where I get an over 1,000% profit on a trade. Last time it happened was in December. But the point is, you can make a lot of money in the stock market, and you can make money as the market goes down. I’ll show you how to do it. I’ll teach you how to do it. All you have to do is come in and copy my trades. Come get all my trade alerts in the discord. Just go to https://weprofit.io/discord so that you can potentially make 1,000% profit in your portfolio also.
Now as I said earlier, there are two very important data points that are coming out this week that are going to determine the future of the stock market for the next three months, and they’re going to help you give a good prediction for where the market’s going to go for the rest of the year. Let’s talk about the first of those data points now. The first thing that can have a major impact on the markets this week is the US economic reports that are coming out. Most notably on Wednesday we are getting the CPI, or Consumer Price Index. This is the inflation data for March. That gets followed up on Thursday with the PPI, or Producer Price Index inflation data.
What’s so important about the inflation data this time around? The reason it’s such a big deal for the markets is because the markets are trying to figure out how many rate cuts the Federal Reserve is going to do this year. All throughout the year, the market was pricing in five or six rate cuts. That very quickly diminished to three rate cuts over the past two weeks, which is why we’ve seen the market momentum start to die down. And we started to see a little bit of a sell off in the market as the stock market starts to reprice three rate cuts instead of five or six. But if the CPI or PPI inflation data comes in higher than expected, then those market expectations for Fed rate cuts could be dropped all the way down to one or two rate cuts.
In fact, many bond traders are already pricing in one to two rate cuts this year instead of the three that the Federal Reserve said they were going to do. The bond market is already fearful the Fed’s not going to do three rate cuts. And if the stock market reprices lower rate cuts as well, that could cause stock prices to drop. Now this inflation data is very important, because over the past four months in a row, we have seen the inflation data, at least the month over month numbers, go higher and higher and higher – from 0.1% month over month, to 0.2% to 0.3%. And then last month, 0.4%. So the inflation data that’s coming out for March, which will be released on Wednesday with the CPI and Thursday of the PPI, is very, very important for the markets.
That’s going to give us a first indication if inflation is continuing to go up, or if the past four months were just a little bit of seasonal adjustment, and inflation is in fact continuing to come back down. It’s also going to give us the clearest picture we have of how much rate cuts the Federal Reserve might do this year. And in turn, the stock market is expected to react accordingly. If the CPI and PPI inflation data comes in lower than expected, we could see the stock market rally. If the CPI and PPI data comes in higher than expected, we will most certainly get a major stock market sell off. The real question, especially for bulls, is as the stock market rally faces its key test this week, will a higher than expected inflation data actually kill rate cut hopes?
Stock market bulls can be forgiven for wondering if interest rate cuts really matter. Investors, after all, had stormed into 2024 amid expectations that the Federal Reserve would deliver around six, one quarter percentage point cuts by the end of the year, beginning in March, with the first one. Those expectations have since been whittled down to around three rate cuts. March, of course, came and went with no rate cut. Yet stocks still rallied to a series of record highs.
So do the Fed rate cuts even matter? Well, yes, but not for the reasons that you think. The fact that the stock market continued to rally despite the Federal Reserve lowering the number of rate cuts they were expected to do, is a stark reminder that earnings are always center stage when it comes to the stock market. A strong economy and a resilient consumer speak to expectations for earnings growth, which has helped to fuel the stock market rally over the past five months. The belief among investors is that if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, this is going to cause earnings to go down. And if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, this is going to cause the earnings to go up.
And that is why, as hopes for Fed rate cuts came in, this pushed the stock market higher, because people expected earnings to be higher. But as the Federal Reserve delays those interest rate cuts, this pushes the stock market down, or at the very least pauses the stock market rally, because investors have to consider the fact that if interest rates do not come down, earnings might not go up. And that leads us to the second key data point that’s coming out this week that is going to have a major impact on the stock market for the next three months.
Earnings season starts on Friday, and it is going to test the stock market rally. Also, the fear is that if progress on inflation stalls, and Wednesday and Thursday and the Fed continues to wait to cut rates, investors could face a reckoning after such a ferocious ascent in stocks. If the market is going to move higher in light of the Fed doing fewer and fewer rate cuts, we think a lot of that will come from actual earnings growth this earnings season. Companies are going to have to show continued earnings growth that lines up with stock market investors expectations for incredible earnings growth.
Right now, the stock market is pricing in huge earnings growth for this quarter. But unfortunately economists are expecting a continued decline in earnings growth. They’re still expecting earnings growth at 3.2%, but in a continued decline from the higher earnings growth that we saw in Q3 and Q4. And really, it’s not even going to be the Q1 earnings that our investors are so interested in. It’s really going to be the forward guidance. What do companies predict is going to be their earnings for the next three quarters and the rest of 2024? Investors are also interested in what the quarterly results and commentary from company executives reveals about the state of the consumer.
We know consumers are still spending, but many economists believe that Americans are close to burning through pandemic buffered savings and are feeling stretched by higher costs on everything from groceries to rent. Early reports suggest consumers have already pulled back in certain areas. ConAgra reported lower quarterly sales, and Nike last month posted flat quarterly sales and forecast a drop in sales for the first half of this year. Earnings results from Mega-cap technology companies in the weeks ahead loom large over the market. Earnings estimates for the rest of 2024 are upbeat. Analysts expect profits among companies in the S&P 500 to rise about 11% for the year.
But if results come in weaker than expected, that could run the risk of making stocks appear more expensive relative to companies profits moving forward. The biggest risk to the stock market right now is that valuations are a little bit stretched, and that would leave the market vulnerable if earnings growth does not come through. And unfortunately, over the past two weeks we’ve gotten some earnings from quite a few companies that have not been that great. What we saw from companies like Nike was a slowdown in earnings. We also saw Darden Restaurants report a slowdown in their consumer traffic. And numerous other companies giving earnings warnings as well, including most recently, Ulta on Friday.
As we look at all of these earnings warnings, we begin to realize that this earnings season might not come in quite as good as the stock market is currently pricing in. And that is the real risk to the stock market right now. I talked in depth about the recent earnings that companies have reported in my video last week, which you can watch here. The thing to remember is that earnings season starts on Friday with banks such as JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Blackrock, and Citi all reporting before the open. If those earnings, as well as the earnings coming out over the next couple of weeks, come in lower than the market’s currently pricing in, this could cause a significant shift in the stock market, and could cause stocks to take a significant drop to the downside.
At this point, pretty much perfection is priced into the stock market. The only possible way for stocks to continue to go higher is if companies not only beat earnings expectations, but they also forecast continued above expected growth for the next three quarters for the rest of 2024. If companies either miss earnings expectations for Q1, or if they forecast slower than expected growth for Q2, Q3, and Q4, then we could see a stock market sell off. Given the extremely lofty valuations we have right now, it’s going to be very unlikely that companies are going to be able to meet the extremely lofty expectations from investors, and that is why options traders have started to buy a lot of put options to hedge their portfolio against a downturn in the market.
Now, I can’t possibly go over everything you need to know in one short video, so make sure you sign up for my free weekly newsletter. In that free weekly newsletter that goes out every Sunday night, I go over everything that you need to know for the stock market for the week. It includes technical analysis on the market. It includes investor sentiment on the market. We talk about the momentum of the market. We talk about the upcoming news that’s going to move the market, including the economic data. We talk about the earnings that are coming out for the future week. And we even talk about crypto. So if you want to know everything that you need to know before the market opens on Monday, make sure you sign up for that free weekly newsletter.