S&P 400

The biggest catalyst for overnight markets, first reported on this site, was the announcement by Kuwait that its oil workers had ended their strike which disrupted oil production in the 4th largest OPEC producer for 3 days cutting it by as much as 1.7 mmb/d, and had served to offset the negative news from the Doha debacle. Kuwait Petroleum also added that it would boost output to 3m b/d within 3 days, which in turn has pressured the price of oil overnight, and the May WTI contract was back to just over $40 at last check, sliding 2%.

In recent weeks Bank of America's new chief technician Stephen Suttmeier has been surprisingly bearish, predicting that the rally is over, as Tom DeMark cautioned yesterday, key support levels are not defended in which case the S&P 500 is looking at a substantially greater drop. Today, his skepticism reached new heights, when he warned that should the failure to break out higher persist then the market is facing a drop to as low ast 1575-1600, something which even Goldman now agrees with.

Below is an excerpt from his latest attempt at a diplomatic guide down:

The S&P 500 is down 8.02% YTD through the first five sessions of February. This is the second worst start to the year going back to 1928 and the weakest since 2008, when the S&P 500 dropped 8.95% YTD through the first five days of February. This, as BofAML's Stephen Suttmeier details, compares to an average 1.16% gain for this period. The S&P 500 also has bearish signals for the Nov-Jan and January barometers. This is a risk for 2016.

Large cap financials have had an awful time in the last month and are 11.7% lower so far in 2016.

As ConvergEx's Nick Colas details, that’s worse than pretty much anything else, including all other S&P 500 sectors, the Russell 2000 small cap index, and even the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.