After eerily calm months in a steady uptrend, when every small dip was immediately bought, the stock market looks to be returning to more regular volatility with the first S&P 500 pullback close to 5% since the market bottomed in April.

The culprit mainly is a liquidity bottleneck caused by increasing impacts of a record-long government shutdown.

On the flip side, a resolution to the shutdown could lead to a positive impulse for the next leg of a rally into the seasonably favorable end-of-year at any time.

Momentum is a fright train that will most likely remain the stock market’s primary driver for months to come.

Under the hood the market has displayed an extreme bifurcation between stocks making new highs and new lows simultaneously.

This has triggered a number of market breadth warnings, which are significant when they occur in clusters, but tend to signal several months ahead of market tops.