For the past month, the stock market has been running on a single cylinder. As of Friday, technology was the only sector pushing to new all-time highs, while the rest of the market, including the S&P 500 itself, lagged. That is the very definition of poor market breadth, where only a single or narrow group of stocks appreciates while everything else quietly bleeds or holds lower. Poor market breadth tends to make seasoned investors nervous because narrow rallies have historically been far more fragile than broad ones.
Early signs suggest something may be shifting, though. Long-dated Treasury bonds, as tracked by the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (NASDAQ: TLT), caught a brief but notable bid this past week after a punishing stretch of rising yields. So far, though, that bounce has not developed materially.
