It's official:
IBM stock, $IBM, is now on track for its biggest daily decline since 1968, down -26%.
That's -$70 billion in market cap erased today.
The lesson? Don't get comfortable in the AI economy, keep evolving.
Sometimes the setup writes itself. Here's what I see lining up.
1. Semis pulling back. A well-deserved breather in the most stretched, most crowded sector in the market, now more than 20% of the entire S&P 500. When one sector gets that heavy, its breather is the whole market's breather.
2. Warsh being tested. Kevin Warsh just took over the Fed, and every new chair gets tested by the market early, the way every chair before him was. The bond market always pokes at the new guy to see what he's made of.
3. Mid-term seasonality turning. The stretch into October of a mid-term year is historically the weakest, roughest window in the entire four-year cycle. It's also the one that sets up the strongest rally that follows.
4. Inflation expectations rolling over. The forward-looking gauges are starting to soften, even as the official prints stay hot.
Put it together and you get the conditions for a sharp, ugly pullback. The kind that feels like the start of a bear market. Heavy sector, new Fed, weak seasonality, nervous tape.
Here's where I part ways with the crowd.
I don't think that's the top. I think it's the shakeout before the real move.
Because the final piece of fuel hasn't arrived yet. An easing Fed. The market isn't pricing it today, quite the opposite, rates are expected to hold and some even see a hike. But if inflation expectations keep falling and Warsh gets the room to cut, that's the accelerant.
That's the 1998 script. A frightening drop that felt terminal, then a Fed that eased into it, and a melt-up that ran eighteen more months into 2000.
My take:
โ A pullback sharp enough to scare everyone out
โ Then a major melt-up
โ S&P toward 10,000, Nasdaq toward 40,000
The drop is the toll. The melt-up is the road.