I was out of the country on spring break with my family last week and other than doing the weekly signal update, I was a bit out of touch with the markets. There is nothing like isolation to help clear your mind and return some proper perspectives (though the sun and sand doesn’t hurt either!) Without the saturation of repetitive financial “news” stories trying to disect every move of the indices, the break gave me a chance to generate some new article ideas and work on a few that I have been researching.

Unfortunately, every vacation has to come to an end and when I got back to work this weekend on the signals, I felt like saying “Give me a break.” Putting it simply, last week was the most destructive I have seen in many months. There’s nothing like the double-team of higher oil and higher interest rates to put pressure on the market and for geopolitical / US politics to make it worse. The move was broad based and while interest rate sensitive stocks were hit harder than most, I saw very little concentrations in size or style categories. It was an equal opportunity bashing as strong stocks got weaker and weak stocks got weaker.