The August 2022 equity advance is the start of a new bull market, not a bear-market rally that leads to new lows.

What counted as right

Status

resolved

Settled on

2022-09-26

TRUE if, between 2022-08-18 and 2025-08-18, the S&P 500 (a) never closes below its lowest close of 2022 prior to 2022-08-18 (the 2022-06-16 closing low) and (b) rises at least 20% above that low; FALSE if it closes below that prior low at any point in the window ('a bear market rally that leads to new lows').

Resolved on the facts; no outcome value assigned here. The two halves of the written criterion point in opposite directions, so the quantify stage should read the criterion's own tiebreak carefully. Condition (a) — 'never closes below the 2022-06-16 closing low of 3666.77' — failed, and the criterion states explicitly that the record is FALSE 'if it closes below that prior low at any point in the window'. That happened on 2022-09-26 (3655.04) and the index bottomed at 3577.03 on 2022-10-12, i.e. the August 2022 advance was in fact followed by new lows. Condition (b) — a 20% rise above the low — was met much later, on 2023-06-15. Because the criterion makes a breach of (a) independently sufficient for FALSE, resolved_on is set to 2022-09-26, the first date the FALSE branch was satisfied, rather than the 2025-08-18 deadline. No conflicting credible evidence exists: both independent price sources agree exactly. Note the 2022-06-16 low is a closing low; the intraday 2022 low (3636.87 on 2022-06-17) is not what this criterion uses, and the October 2022 intraday low (3491.58 on 2022-10-13) is likewise not used.

Sources

• Watch CNBC's full interview with Fundstrat's Tom Lee

  CNBC · 2022-08-18

  Source