Hooray, The Dow Broke 50K!
Giving the market a sniff test, charting the 17-year bull market, an update on Average Joe's wallet, and we found the source of the ticking.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Macro Obsession.
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Issue #32 — Week of February 9th, 2026
Fresh Breadth
Priced For Perfection
Joe’s Wallet Is Looking Fat
Shovelware a la Claude
Fresh Breadth
Market breadth is still performing very well, and has been since even before TMO first covered it in “Revenge of the Small Caps” (TMO #24). We passed a three standard deviation breakout above trend in small caps (read as: statistically significant), starting from the peak of Max Stupid in 2021.1
Maybe this time it’ll be different. I’m still not buying the small cap index here.
It’s not just small caps doing well against large caps in this most recent market regime, but value stocks doing well against growth stocks. This rotation has driven the relatively value-heavy Dow Jones index up past 50,000, a new all-time high, while the Nasdaq sold off.
Software is taking a hit, but the br…
