Is America’s raging bull market exhausted, or taking a breath?

If you had sp AIspan overindulgent Christmas, you may have begun the new year in a more austere frame of mind. Recent goings-on in the markets may therefore seem familiar. As 2023 drew to a close the American stockmarket was on a ripping run. It ended the year with nine consecutive weeks of gains, the longest winning streak since 2004. The &500 index of leading American stocks was a whisker away from its all-time high, set on January 3rd 2022, when investors thought that interest-rate rises would be small and slow. Now punters are suddenly in a more sober mood, with stocks falling by 1.4% in the first two trading days of the new year. Such modest fluctuations are hardly unusual. Nonetheless, they raise the question of whether the blistering bull market is over, or has further to go.For the first ten months of 2023, the market rally was largely concentrated in seven tech stocks, led by Nvidia, a maker of the computer chips that are used to process artificial-intelligence () algorithms. Since then, however, it broadened and gained pace. Firms that mirror the wider economy, such as retailers and banks, soared—JPMorgan Chase is up by a quarter since late October. The & 500 rose by 14% in the final two months of 2023, and towers 31% above its most recent trough, well above the 20% that is often used to define a bull market.