After a really ugly January, the market turned around and posted the largest four-day rally in over a year.
Looking at the chart below, the S&P 500 looked oversold by the end of January and clearly bounced back from that level. That bounce was aided in part by Janet Yellen talking the market up in her first appearance before Congress as the new Fed Chair. Words alone were obviously a policy tool, as the market bounded upward as she hinted that QE could keep flooding the market with money since “asset purchases are not on a preset course”.
So now, after all the talk about a market correction, with recent moves to the upside, we technically haven’t seen one. It takes a -10% drop to amount to a correction, and we didn’t get that far (the last time we did was in 2011). So call it a dip. Call it a pullback. Whatever we call it, the market is still left with the question: was that it?