Seventy-five percent of S&P 500 stocks ate sh*t in September. The index itself looked fine. This is like watching a hospital report record profits while three-quarters of its patients died in the lobby.
The math works because the other 25% are so grotesquely large that they dragged the corpses upward. Tech giants mostly. The ones retail traders already own because they read about them on Reddit two years ago. Congratulations on finally being right about something. Your Microsoft shares went up while your portfolio somehow went down because you also bought seven other things the internet told you were "undervalued."
Breadth divergence is the technical term. Sounds impressive until you realize it just means most stocks are getting destroyed while the index pretends everything's fine. It's a weighted average doing what weighted averages do. Lying with statistics. Your high school math teacher tried to warn you about this but you were busy passing notes about who might ask you to prom.
Chart nerds will tell you this is bearish. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. The market could rip higher for six months on the backs of five stocks while everything else burns. It's done it before. Or it could collapse next week when those five stocks sneeze. Nobody knows. Especially not the guy writing about it three days after the month ended.
The real story is that 75% of S&P 500 companies had a lousy September and nobody noticed because the index went up anyway. That's not a broken market. That's just how indexes work. You wanted diversification. You got it. Turns out diversifying into 500 stocks means 375 of them can fail you simultaneously while CNBC runs graphics showing green arrows.
But sure, keep checking your portfolio app six times a day like it's going to tell you something different.
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