Year-End Monthly Charts: The Market Took a Breath
I love this exercise, and if I ever skip it, you have full permission to scold me.
It’s noon on New Year’s Eve, so yeah, I’m cheating a little bit. But it would take a pretty serious last-hour move to change the big picture on the monthly charts. And that’s the whole point: the monthly timeframe smooths out all the day-to-day noise we obsess over and forces you to answer one question: Did anything meaningful actually change?
For December, the answer is mostly: no.
On SPY, the monthly candle is basically a spinning top. We pushed up, we pushed down, and we closed about where we opened. In plain English: the market moved around, but nothing was decided. And that’s not bearish. After a strong uptrend, a couple of months of digestion is often exactly what you want to see before the next leg tries to develop.
Zoom out and the theme repeats:
RSP (equal-weight) is resting after breaking its 2024 high. That’s the “average large cap” saying, “I’m not dead, I’m just catching my breath.”
QQQ looks like the same hold pattern.
IWM too, because small caps always manage to make the same story look slightly worse, but it’s still the same story.
Sector-wise, two stood out for different reasons:
Healthcare is interesting because it pushed up into prior highs and then printed a consolidation bar. That’s a spot where you either get follow-through or you get stuck in a bigger range.
Financials were the strongest to my eye. A multi-month base and then a breakout month is the kind of monthly signal you don’t ignore.
The other standout is Bitcoin: pullback, then consolidation. No hero calls here, but it’s still one of the cleaner “risk appetite” tells. If that consolidation resolves well, it tends to help the broader tape feel easier. If it cracks, you usually feel it elsewhere.
What I’m watching into the new year is simple: rest periods want to resolve in the direction of the trend. Not guaranteed. Just the cleanest default until price proves otherwise.
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Happy New Year. And seriously… get away from the screens.