So far in 2018, every trading day where the S&P 500 has finished the day higher has been a record all-time closing high. Just to show how little downside pressure there has been, in the three days where the S&P 500 did trade lower this year, the cumulative decline was just 17 points!  That’s five fewer points than this past Monday’s 22-point gain alone. In total, there have now been twelve record closing highs in 2018, which is already tied for the fourth most in a single month in the index’s history. The record for a single month is 16 back in June 1955, and with just six trading days left this month, the odds are slim that we tie, let alone beat the record.

In the lower chart, we have shown the S&P 500’s performance in the three months that followed each of the prior months where the S&P 500 saw 12 or more record highs in a single month.  Of the six prior months shown, the market went on to post further gains five times.  The only down period was a 1.9% decline in November 1961, while the five periods where the S&P 500 was positive, the index put up gains ranging from 1.8% to 6.4%.

The S&P 500 notched yet another new all-time high today.  Below is an updated look at our tables highlighting the length of days it has been since the last meaningful pullback.

As shown, we’re now at 445 days since the last 3%+ pullback (a record), 575 days since the last 5%+ pullback (18 days from a record), 712 days since the last 10%+ pullback (not close to a record), and 3,242 days since the last 20%+ pullback (2nd longest).

We’ve been saying this for a while now, but the next time the S&P 500 experiences a drop of more than 1%, it’s going to feel like a crash to many investors.  That’s because 1%+ down days have become so foreign lately.  As investors get used to only very small declines on very rare occasions, drops of 1%-2% — which were much more frequent up until the end of 2016 — feel MUCH more painful when they finally do occur.

Below is a chart showing historical streaks of trading days without a 1%+ down day going back to 1945.  While the current streak of 108 trading days isn’t that close to the record streak of 184 trading days seen back in 1963, it’s notable that we just had a 109-trading day streak end last March as well.

Prior to the two recent 100+ trading day streaks without a 1%+ down day, the last two came back in 1995.  1995 was a year that saw very similar action to what we’ve seen over the last 12 months.

If we tighten up the margin of the decline even more, the S&P 500 has not had a decline of 0.60% in 96 trading days.  As shown below, that’s easily a record going back to 1945!

Netflix (NFLX) is up big yet again following its Q4 2017 earnings release last night after the close.  Prior to its earnings report yesterday, we sent the table below to Bespoke Institutional subscribers who have access to our indispensable  Earnings Screener tool.  As shown in the table, Netflix (NFLX) had gapped up following 14 of its 15 January earnings reports since it IPOd!  That’s an incredible trend, and it held yet again this time around.  Following today’s gap up of over 10% for NFLX, it has now gapped up following 15 of its last 16 January earnings reports.  If you have not yet tried out our Earnings Screener, you should really do so now!  The Screener allows you to easily filter through more than 150,000 quarterly earnings reports for more than 5,000 stocks going back 15 years.  Sign up for a 14-day free trial to Bespoke Institutional to gain access.

With Netflix’s (NFLX) move higher today, its market cap has pushed above the $100 billion mark.  That’s a big deal because it joins an exclusive club of 60 other companies that have a market cap of more than $100 billion.  Below is a look at these $100 billion companies sorted from largest to smallest.  Today alone, Netflix’s market cap surpassed companies like United Tech (UTX), Broadcom (AVGO), Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and Caterpillar (CAT).

While the $100 Billion Club is an exclusive list of just 61 companies, we wondered how big the list was back in early 2009 at the lows of the Financial Crisis.  The answer?  Back then, just nine companies were part of the $100 Billion Club at the Financial Crisis lows, and Exxon Mobil (XOM) was the largest at just $319 billion!  It’s truly astounding how far we’ve come since those dark days nine years ago.

Apple (AAPL) — now the largest company in the world — is nearly 3x as large as XOM was back then.  In fact, the combined market caps of Apple and Alphabet now (roughly $1.7 trillion) is larger than the combined markets caps of the 13 largest companies at the lows in 2009.  There are now 27 companies that are larger than the 2nd largest company (WMT) was in 2009.  We could go on and on with similar stats, but you get the point!