Earnings season is finally really here, and perhaps that will bring the focus back down to earth… maybe for a few weeks we’ll stop obsessing about the big picture and the trajectory of future interest rate increases, trying to read the tea leaves to guess when the Federal Reserve will stop raising rates… and start obsessing about what companies say about how their business is doing.

OK, no, we probably won’t… but we can dream.

There were certainly some pockets of optimism in this busy earnings week — I was awfully surprised to see Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta Platforms all say at least somewhat disappointing things about future growth (or in some cases, like META, shockingly bad things)… and yet, thanks in part to Apple giving at least a “meh” quarter to offset Amazon’s negative forecast, the market was still up… and, in fact, ended up having one of the better weeks of the year.

This is why timing the market is almost impossible — even if you had known that four or five of the largest, most owned and most followed companies in the US would have “bad” quarterly reports, missing estimates and/or issuing negative forecasts, you would have probably made the wrong bet (‘the market will go way down’).

Here’s what the one-week chart looked like today, going back to last Friday…. even with the most popular and most-followed stocks in the United States mostly having very negative after-earnings responses this week, with the exception of Apple, both the overall market and the S&P 500 were pretty much flat until late today, and ended up firmly positive. In a market that has been led by those kinds of gigantic hyper-growth tech stocks for many, many years, we got used to the idea that they’re supposed to drive the sentiment of the market (and, indeed, physically move the indexes — those stocks make something like 40% of the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ)). Instead, the market chugs along.

That’s surely not what we would have expected a few months ago, when any bad news in anything seemingly drove people to sell everything. It doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, or that the markets will quickly recover — but it does remind us that the beauty of indexing is its resilience… one leader falls, another rises to take its place. The ...