The usual "Narrative" is that the stock market in form of the S&P 500 is climbing from new high to new high, with the "indicator guys" here and at the MI board therefore seeing all signals on "Go!".

But this picture is very different if you look at the S&P without just a very few dominant stocks and their constant and exorbitant rise this year. Just have a look without Nvidia, Apple and Meta.

Apart from Berkshire I sold everything during the first few months of the year - but kept 1 share each to "keep me honest", to follow them and to see what I might miss by selling them (or not).

Because of said narrative one should expect that I missed out on quite some gains, but no: From around 8 stocks I owned only Alphabet with +10% is up a decent but not exactly overwhelming amount since I sold, and only with Paypal I really missed out (+25%). All others are roughly unchanged from where they were in the first months of the year - apart from DG which lost a full 1/3 since.

So although the S&P is constantly rising since I sold, I didn't miss anything. That could be because I might be an especially bad stock picker, but it seems to be true for most other stocks I am following as well. What I observe is either not or only a little higher, or even far lower than in say February or March, no matter whether it's the boring conservative stuff like MKL, MCD, DIS, KMX, HSY,J&J, DG, VZ, WRB, or former high-flyers like DDOG, NET, CRWD, S, SNOW, or even MSFT.

Therefore I am sceptical about the usual "All good as long as the index is climbing from new high to new high", as I see those "new highs" to be kind of "fake", not containing much information and to be not as relevant for the state of "The Market" as it appears.