That makes the explanation for what caused the break in order relatively easy to determine. We believe that it may be fully attributed to the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on 22 December 2017, the provisions of which would take effect in 1 January 2018, to which investors would respond vigorously to their new incentives from the law beginning with the first day of trading in 2018 on 2 January 2018. It then took just eight trading days for the break in the previous period of relative order in the U.S. stock market to become definitive.

The new incentives for investors arise from the large and permanent reduction in corporate income tax rates, where investors may benefit by realizing larger dividend payments, by companies using their newly-freed funds to increase their productive investments, to lower their prices to consumers to gain market share, to better insulate themselves against having arbitrarily higher costs from government-mandated expenses imposed upon them (firms boosting the wages of their lowest paid employees can be said to be taking this action), or to simply use the opportunity of the newly-freed funds to improve their balance sheets. Or some combination of any or all of the above.