It’s amazing what a week makes.   Almost every American, Latin America and European equity market indices we track had their best weekly performances of the year.   The S&P500 ETF, SPY, for example, had five straight up days of over .85%, which is unprecedented since it began trading in 1993.  We’ll let the equity fireworks illustrated below in the charts speak for themselves.

Next week should see a rest before earnings kick off in earnest.  Our base case is the market trades in a range throughout the rest of the summer and most equity indices are getting close to the top of that range.  If earnings blowout, the “good private sector/bad public sector” trade could take-off where even equities of strong balance sheet/decent growth companies begin to be perceived as safer havens than governments.   We shall see.   Stay tuned.

(click here if charts are not observable)