Hey trader,
The market hasn’t moved in two months.
I pulled up the S&P 500 this morning and ran it from March 30th to today. T
here’s no volatility on it anywhere. No open air gaps, no window gaps, just a slow grind higher with nothing underneath it.
I call this a sticky market. The price sits glued in place like sticky rice, going nowhere.
A quiet tape feels safe. That stillness is the most dangerous thing on my screen right now, and I’ve watched it precede the worst unwinds of my 39 years.
Here’s why it matters to your account today. A sticky market hands you no bias to trade and no cushion to land on. You can’t read it, you can’t trade it safely, and there’s nothing to catch the fall when it breaks.
I’ll show you what’s sitting underneath this calm. Then I’ll show you the exact moves I’ve made in my own account this week.
The Tape That Won’t Move
The MACD on the S&P is completely flat. A flat reading is an unreadable reading, and it throws off no signal in either direction.
That leaves you guessing, and guessing is not what I do for a living. Trading this tape is like flying a plane with no instruments.
Look at what the stickiness has done to the tape:
- The MACD has gone flat and unreadable, giving you no bullish or bearish bias to lean on.
- We’ve been overbought for about two straight months, which I have never seen in my entire career.
- There hasn’t been a single down day of even 1% in three to four months.
None of that is healthy. None of it is natural.
The market has run almost 20% from late March with no downtick. I went back through my charts to find the last time it climbed this fast with no down day.
It was right before the 1987 crash. The chart pattern then is the chart pattern now, a vertical run with no air pockets and no fear priced in.
One thing was different in 1987. The economy was already sliding toward recession, and when I look at the food stocks and the retail stocks today, we’re closer to that than the data admits.
The Loop Holding It Up
This stillness isn’t an accident. The algos have rigged a feedback loop where every dip gets bought before it can breathe.
You watched it happen today. The tape dropped 30 points and got bought right back to where it started.
Money pours out of consumer staples after they get crushed 5%. It rolls straight into the same handful of AI names, over and over.
That loop is the glue holding the rice together. There’s a cost climbing underneath it that almost nobody is tracking.
AI build-out costs are rising twice as fast as anything else in the economy. If the return on that spending ever disappoints, the loop breaks in a matter of hours.
When it breaks, there’s no liquidity up here to soften the landing. Leave sticky rice out overnight and it dries, it crackles, and it falls apart. A market this concentrated does the same thing, with window gaps and margin calls before you can react.
What To Do Before It Breaks
This is the part that protects your account, so read it twice. Here’s exactly how I’m positioned right now:
- Raise cash and do it now. I’m sitting on 60% and pushing toward 70% to 80%, and I don’t care if I sit there for eight months.
- Cut your size. Scale out of your weakest positions so a single gap can’t wreck the account.
- Don’t try to short it here. My weekly is still vertical, and shorting a market on the way up just feeds the algo buying.
Sit and watch instead. I got one short off in Roku today because it had real movement, and that’s the only bar worth taking a trade at right now.
When the volatility comes back, and it will, you’ll be the one holding cash while everyone else is trapped in size.
The stillness is the warning. Don’t wait for the crackle to believe it.
Professor Jeffrey Bierman
Creator of the Genesis COG System
