Monday Takeaways: Why You Should Embrace This Market Pullback

Shah Gilani|March 10, 2025

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room…

As I write, the S&P 500 is down almost 2%, wiping out Friday’s late-day rally.

But I want you to keep a few things in mind.

First, we haven’t had a market correction since the back half of 2023, and it barely qualified.

The last real drop happened in 2022, which took the S&P 500 into bear market territory.

Yet, 2023 and 2024 produced some of the most spectacular back-to-back market gains we’ve seen in decades.

Pullbacks happen. They’re normal.

Don’t fear them. Embrace them.

I’ve traded through tough times before and always come out the other side.

You will, too.

My advice?

Take everything one day at a time. Be as analytical as possible.

I’ll show you how in today’s video.

Click on the image below to watch.

Transcript:

Hey, everybody.

Shah Gilani here with your Monday Takeaways.

Look, I’m going to cut this down for you…

There’s not a lot of good to take away from what’s been happening.

I’m going to start with last week, as I usually do. Because that was the week that WAS…

And, it may not be over.

Futures were already down this morning.

Last week was a pretty ugly week overall.

The S&P 500 was down 3%. At its low, it was down 3.5%. But Friday had a monumental rally in the afternoon.

Without it, we would have been down yet again. And we probably would have ended up below the S&P 500’s 200-day exponential moving average, just to give you a little bit of an idea of how crazy things were on Friday.

Many people, commentators, bloggers, and analysts were talking about how we bounced off the 200-day moving average (we didn’t). That put us up 0.5% from Thursday’s close.

But while the market ended up higher on Friday, there was a lot of scary trading underneath.

To give you an idea, the S&P 500 closed on Friday at $5,770.20.

The day’s low was $5,667.00, well below the 200-day moving average.

At the low of the day, the market would have been off 1.2% for the day.

But they had a furious rally of almost 2.0% in the afternoon that took the market off its lows, leaving it exactly 0.55% higher.

So everyone thought, “Well, goodness gracious! We bounced off an important support.”

Except, we didn’t bounce off support. I don’t know what these people are talking about.

We crashed through the 200-day moving average. The 200-day moving average was $5,733.00.

At the low on Friday, we were at $5,667.00. We were 1.2% below the 200-day moving average.

The fact that we rallied 1.8% from the lows to positive territory was great.

However, we’ve already seen the damage done.

Now here we are this morning, Monday, before the open.

Everything’s down.

The NASDAQ is down 1.6% in the premarket.

The S&P 500 is looking at $5,700. There’s that magic, psychological number. That puts us down 1.3% in the premarket.

So, the takeaway from this morning is, yeah, we ended Friday higher. But who knows why.

It was likely some last-minute short covering from traders betting against the market over the last couple of weeks.

Tech is again leading the market down.

I could show you all the charts of the big names.

Pretty ugly stuff, people.

So, what else do we take away from last week?

We had the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talk about a “detox period.”

And, we had the president talking about a “transition period.”

It’s concerning when Donald Trump starts talking about the market not being that important.

He said over the weekend that the Chinese take a 100-year view. So why are we concerned about the market over such a short period of time?

Everyone expected there would be some kind of Trump put (support). So, if the markets went down, he’d be there to rally them up some way or another.

Now, he’s basically saying that what we’re trying to do here to readjust the world order could be a little painful.

My words, not his.

That’s a little scary.

In other words, there may not be a Trump put.

And if we do fall into a recession, which is possible, analysts will knock down GDP estimates for the full 2025 year.

Goldman Sachs just dropped their 2025 forecast on Friday from 2.2% GDP growth to 1.7%.

Morgan Stanley dropped theirs from 1.9% GDP growth in 2025 to 1.5%.

Those are important reductions from some pretty influential analysts who a lot of people follow.

Traders follow their economists because this is the information they send to their institutional clients to give them a heads-up.

And that means they’re being told, “Listen, maybe we need to set ourselves up for a potential slowdown in the economy.”

So that starts the ball rolling from an institutional level.

To wrap things up, people are starting to ratchet down their expectations for growth.

They don’t believe Trump or Bessent will come in and save the stock market as it goes through this “transitional detox period.”

Your takeaway from all of this: Be careful out there.

It’s going to be another interesting week.

I’ll catch you guys next week.

Cheers.