One of the biggest misperceptions in investing starts with the phrase we all casually use.
“The stock market.”
It sounds fine but it’s also misleading.
What actually exists is a market of stocks.
Individual securities, each with their own supply, demand, trend, and investor base.
When we forget that distinction, we let headlines do our thinking for us.
Great analysis lives in nuance and context, not in slogans or summary statistics.
This is where most people go wrong.
When financial media says “the market is weak” or “tech is underperforming,” they’re usually talking about a cap-weighted index.
A handful of mega-cap names dominate the scoreboard. When those names struggle, the entire sector gets painted with the same brush.
Technology is a perfect example right now.
You’ve likely heard plenty of chatter about tech underperformance.
Microsoft and Apple are both sitting in roughly 15 percent drawdowns.
Those two names alone carry enough weight to distort how the entire sector appears to be behaving.
But step back and look at the market of tech stocks instead of the tech index.
Equal-weight technology is making new all-time highs.
Same sector, same stocks but a completely different message.
That’s the illusion markets love to play.
A few large stocks can drag down the optics while the majority of stocks underneath are quietly doing their job.
Advancing. Breaking out. Acting healthy.
This is why breadth work matters. This is why intermarket analysis matters.
It’s not about predicting narratives.
It’s about comparing markets of stocks to other markets of stocks and letting price tell you where participation actually exists.
The stock market is what gets quoted on TV.
The market of stocks is where opportunity lives.
Tomorrow on Thompson’s Two Cents, I’ll walk through a full technical breakdown of what the market of stocks is signaling right now, and why paying attention to internal strength matters more than listening to surface-level headlines.
