Jobless claims came in lower than expected for the second time in a row this week, beating what almost appears to be a stale consensus forecast.  While economists were forecasting claims to come in at a level of 265K, the actual reading was 4K lower at 261K.  The reason we referred to the consensus estimate as being stale is that it has been 265K for six of the last seven weeks.  In the economists’ defense, though, the weekly print of jobless claims has been in the 260Ks range for five straight weeks.  From a longer-term perspective, claims have now been below 300K for 77 straight weeks, and that’s the longest streak below 300K since 1970.

With five straight weekly readings in the 260K range, it should come as no surprise that the four-week moving average is also in the 260Ks, specifically 264K.  It has now been 18 weeks since the four-week moving average made its cycle low of 256K, and in order to get back down there, claims will need to take another leg lower.

Finally, on a non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis, jobless claims fell to 216.6K, which is more than 80K below the average for the current week dating back to 2000 and the lowest reading for the current week of the year since 1973.

The S&P 500 has seen a modest decline over the last week, but it was enough to send a large number of bullish individual investors scurrying for the exits.  According to the weekly sentiment poll from the American Association of Individual Investors, bullish sentiment saw the largest weekly decline since March this week, falling from 35.56% down to 29.42%.  That’s the lowest weekly reading since the week after the Brexit vote and now makes it 43 straight weeks where bullish sentiment has been below 40% and the 77th week in the last 78.  Will bulls ever be a majority again?  If they haven’t been able to get to majority status during this Summer’s rally, it’s hard to imagine what kind of rally it would take.

While bullish sentiment declined, bearish sentiment ticked up to just under 30% and its highest level since just after the Brexit vote.  At 29.64%, bears now outnumber bulls despite the fact that the S&P 500 is just below all-time highs.

Nearly eleven months ago today, a rally in the biotech sector was stopped dead in its tracks when Hillary Clinton tweeted about ‘outrageous’ ‘price gouging’ in the pricing of medications and treatments.  If you owned stocks in the sector back then, the scars of that tweet ‘heard around the biotech world’ are likely still healing.  The Nasdaq Biotech Index ultimately fell over 30% from those levels, bottoming out in early January.  It tested those lows in June but has subsequently rallied nearly 25% since then.

Well, it appears as though Mrs. Clinton has once again had enough of the rally in biotech stocks.  Earlier today, she tweeted that there was ‘no justification’ for the price hikes in Mylan’s Epipen, and once again the tweet echoed across the biotech world.  Not only Mylan declined, but the rest of the specialty drug/biotech sector followed suit and fell more than 3.5% for its worst day since the Friday after the surprise Brexit vote.  With Wednesday’s decline, the Nasdaq Biotech index also traded below 3,000 for the first time this month.  If you are long the biotech sector, today’s action was an uncomfortable moment of deja vu.