"That's never happened before"

This was the most interesting stock market related tweet I read all weekend from Jason Goepfert at Sentiment Trader saying that while the S&P 500 closed at an all time high, "the Russell 2000 is still in a bear market*, down more than 20% from its high. That's never happened before." My tweet back to him, "Easily one of the strangest markets I've ever seen." I say this, and something I've said before, because we all breathe the same economic air. I'd argue too that every single one of these 2000 stocks are likely customers of the cult tech stocks that many are still piling into. Can a dislocation to this extent just continue on? Maybe but hopefully we'll get some more information and can connect some dots over the coming weeks when earnings from many more companies get released and we hear about what they're seeing in the global economy. 

https://twitter.com/jasongoepfert/status/1748455766565031958

I'm sure some of this is ever shrinking analyst coverage of smaller companies and the passive flow into big cap stocks. I get it. 

As we think about the coming trends in inflation (I expect service inflation to continue to disinflate because of rents but sticky labor costs to be a partial offset and I expect core goods prices to inflect higher this year because of the jump in transportation costs, an inevitable inventory restocking at some point this year, and sharply higher insurance costs), and in the face of that Red Sea related jump in shipping costs, I want to print here again what JB Hunt said about its insurance costs and that this will get passed on to customers and consumers.

"On the topic of insurance, we have been routinely covering with you the inflationary cost headwinds we faced as a Company, as well as an industry in the areas of professional driver and non-driver wages, healthcare benefits, and equipment cost. However, as an industry, we are also seeing unprecedented pressure in the area of claims, cost, or settlements. As you saw in our release, we incurred $53mm of additional costs in the quarter, largely related to higher claims cost and exceeding coverage limits in certain insurance layers. And this, despite 2023 being the Company's best performance in history on safety, measured about having our lowest DOT preventable accidents per million miles. Yet our insurance rates continued to increase as the industry experiences higher verdicts, and as a result, higher litigation settlements. During verdicts in trucking cases where the verdicts exceed $1mm, have seen an 867% increase in the average size of verdicts from 2010 to 2018. This is according to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. Given that the majority of motor carriers in the industry carry only $1mm in coverage, just above the legal minimum $750,000 in coverage, it's the larger carriers who bear the brunt or disproportionate share of the escalating insurance and claims cost and ultimately these inflationary costs get passed on to customers and consumers." I bolded for emphasis.