Tuesday closed lower across the US board. The S&P 500 gave up 0.45%, the Dow 0.63%, the Nasdaq 100 0.65% and the Russell 2000 0.76%. The move that mattered sat outside equities. WTI crude jumped 4.4% to $105.83. Diesel supply is the pressure point behind it. Half of Russia’s largest diesel refineries have cut output after drone strikes, and China is weighing fresh export limits on refined fuel. The grain complex ran with the energy bid, corn up 4.6%, wheat 3.0% and soybeans 2.6%. Gold slipped 0.44% and Solana dropped 6.7%. Wednesday has opened the other way. US futures came in higher, the European indices trade 0.2% to 0.3% up with semiconductors and banks leading, and Asia closed green with Shanghai 0.71% higher and the Kospi 1.37%. Brent sits near $108 and Treasuries are flat. The market prices a quarter-point hike from the Fed this afternoon, another in December and one to one and a half more through 2027. Retail sales for August came first, the decision follows at 2pm in New York.
One of the scan’s recent alarms has already been paid. Solana was flagged at -93 on September 9, the deepest reading on the board then and still the deepest today, and Tuesday delivered the answer with a 6.7% drop that leaves the price about 7% under the level of that alert. Corn did not hold its warning, the bull exit from Friday’s data (the bulls leave the field, the upswing appears finished) was answered by a 4.6% rise on Tuesday and the reading has slipped out of the zone at -59. The board around those two has arranged itself into an unusually uniform picture. Nine markets sit in the critical alarm range, and five of them share one stage, a move that has run too far and has yet to turn.
The thread that holds today’s board together is that both ends of it are stretched, floors and ceilings alike, on the afternoon the Fed decides. On the floor side the S&P 500 industrials hold +87 and the PHLX Semiconductor index +85, both within reach of the bullish maximum of +100 and both at bear exhaustion, the sellers have overreached with no counter-move yet. The Shanghai Composite joins at +73 on six cycles. On the ceiling side the two-year Treasury yield enters at -77 with bull exhaustion, the upward move is overstretched but still running, and the ten-year sits at -68 beside it. Every one of those windows is open. In Wednesday’s session the first movement arrives in the direction the floor side describes, the chip index up 1.4% and the industrials 0.4% as this is written, and none of it is a close yet.
Our daily analysis filters roughly 45 markets through a cycle consensus engine. Each asset receives a Consensus Score from -100 to +100, the model’s summary reading for a possible turn, where positive values mark potential cyclical bottoms (a time window where a decline could end) and negative values potential cyclical tops (a window where a rise could stall or reverse). Readings beyond ±60 enter the critical zone, a critical reading at which the cycle model raises the alarm for a possible turn. Let’s take a closer look.
