Despite a highly eventful week in the news, not much has changed from a stock market perspective. No doubt, investors have grown immune to the daily reports of geopolitical turmoil, including Ukraine vs. Russia for control of the eastern regions, Japan’s dispute with China over territorial waters, Sunni vs. Shiite for control of Iraq, Christians being driven out by Islamists, and other religious conflicts in places like Nigeria and Central African Republic.

More unnerving conflicts around the globe have flared up, but as usual, U.S. equity investors have given it nary a yawn as they seem to have become pretty much numb to the steady stream of unwelcome news, particularly out of the Middle East. Now we enter the summer version of earnings season.

Stock investors entered the Fourth of July holiday on a high note, pushing the Dow Jones Industrials Index above 17,000 and the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index above 21,000, and even pushing the S&P 500 to a smidge above the upper trend line of its long-standing bullish ascending channel that has been in place for nearly three years.

Stocks continue to hold up like troopers even though bulls have lost some traction, perhaps due to a combination of the summer doldrums and overbought technical conditions that have them biding time until the next setup for a run at new highs. To be sure, bears are AWOL and missing their opportunity to create some fear and ignite a correction.

Well, it’s official. The old adage about selling in May didn’t apply this year. Instead, larger-cap, higher-quality, and value-oriented stocks continued to lead the market higher. The S&P 500 gained +2.1% during the month and confirmed its tentative technical breakout from the prior Friday with steady progress last week. However, it was tepid at best during the holiday-shortened week, and a somewhat concerning ‘double-low’ confirmation -- i.e., on extremely low (and decreasing) volume and with a backdrop of persistently low volatility.

Last week’s market performance was nasty again, especially for the Small-cap Growth style/cap, down 4%.  Large-caps faired the best, losing only 2.7%.  That’s ugly and today’s market seemed likely to be uglier today with escalating tensions over the weekend in Ukraine. 

Today was the beginning of “spring break” for the market.  At least it seemed that way with a very low trading volume of only 600M shares on the NYSE.  Either the college crowd does more trading than we imagined or parents are taking the week off as well.