Weekly S&P500 ChartStorm - 21 December 2025
This week: the presidential cycle, global stocks, rotation, cycles and peaks, cash allocations, valuations, profit margins, and dealing with bad indications...
Welcome to the latest Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm!
Learnings and conclusions from this week’s charts:
The “Presidential Cycle” points to a volatile and ranging 2026.
Global stocks have significantly outperformed vs US stocks this year.
Fund managers are running record low cash allocations.
Mid-Cap stocks look cheap in absolute and relative terms.
Rotation inflection points are emerging (US vs global, equal vs cap-weight).
Overall, it’s been a very interesting year so far on both the risk and return fronts, and there’s a few key inflection points in play that are going to be worth keeping close tabs on into 2026…
p.s. check out my “Best Charts of 2025” from my work at Topdown Charts [link]
1. Presidential Cycle: Here’s another seasonality-cycle chart that’s pointing to the prospect of volatile and ranging price action ahead in 2026. It echoes the Decennial Pattern discussed a couple of weeks ago, and again; these are just statistical descriptions of the past and there’s no hard tangible reason to expect a repeat, but we now have 2 different series suggesting similar scenarios.
Of course things like Fed rate cuts, potential tariff tax refunds, AI investment, and global growth reacceleration might help make it different this time, but it’s enough to prompt a closer look (particularly as valuations remain elevated, geopolitical risk simmering, and various other macro issues lurking on the radar).
