“Maybe we should take Trump at his word: He wants to remake the U.S. economy, and has said he’s willing to absorb the pain necessary to do that. We should invest like he means it.” -Ben Levisohn, in his March 31st, 2025, Barron’s Up & Down Wall Street column
“Yesterday ranked as the 28th worst session for the S&P 500 since 1954. In other words, a 1-in-10,000 event.” -David Rosenberg, in this morning’s Breakfast with Dave
“The markets are going to boom.” -President Donald Trump, April 3rd, 2025 (perhaps he should have said “go boom”?)
Chart Extravaganza!
Regular, and maybe even irregular, readers are undoubtedly aware that I believe multi-year breakouts from trading ranges are highly significant. The same is true with breakdowns and, should the S&P and NASDAQ continue to crack, those will become even more critical to monitor. (Based on today’s plunge, on top of yesterday’s bungee jump, there might be a slew of stocks breaking multi-year support. Maybe Liberation Day was meant to liberate investors from what had been illusions of financial brilliance, at least in the case of those who grossly overpaid for high-momentum shares with alluring stories.)
However, this study of breakouts begs the question as to whether these events actually are worthy of your attention and examination. This Haymaker edition is meant to answer that pertinent query, at least in terms of breakouts, otherwise known as upside range expansions..
Speaking of charts, now that I am no longer working full-time, my intent is to run more chartbook editions via the Friday Haymakers. Typically, those will be based on macro, or big picture, trends versus individual stocks. Periodically, though, I’ll likely throw in some interesting stock charts despite that those will usually end up inside of a Making Hay Monday.
To the point of this edition, I had asked one of my former team members at Evergreen Gavekal to begin tracking a lengthy list of stocks breaking out back toward the end of 2023. Enough time has elapsed since then to do a look-back at how these have done.
There were 70 that made the cut at the time, large enough to be a meaningful sample set, in my view. Rather than overwhelm you with all of these, we’re showing “just” the first 20. They are not in any particular order and, as you will see, a couple of them haven’t been standout performers. Out of this collection there were two laggards: Shell and Elevance, especially the latter; I’ll come back to those shortly. (Note, the below charts are not updated for the carnage of the last two days.)