IBEX 35: nine weeks of nothing, and why that is the wayIBEX 35TVC:IBEX35MarxBabuA year in four moves. November. The index bottoms at 15,892. Nothing about it looked like a floor at the time — it rarely does. November to July. A grinding, unspectacular advance. Two real drawdowns along the way, neither of which broke the sequence of higher lows. By midsummer IBEX has added roughly 4,400 points. Late July. Price tags 20,356.5. That is +28% off the low, and it is the highest print on this chart. The nine weeks since. Nothing. Genuinely nothing. The index has traded between 19,734.7 and 20,356.5 — a 3.1% box — for over two months. Friday closed 20,021.81, almost exactly the middle of it. That last move is the one worth sitting with. After a 28% advance, a market usually does one of two things: it keeps going, or it gives a meaningful portion back. IBEX has done neither. It has simply stopped, at the highs, and stayed there — which is a different message from either. Sideways at the top of a trend is not distribution by default. It is also not accumulation by default. It is what a market looks like when buyers are unwilling to pay up and sellers see no reason to hurry. Nine weeks is long enough that this is a stance, not a pause. The box has two edges and neither has broken. 20,356.5 above, 19,734.7 below. The next real information comes from which one goes first, and how far price travels in the days after it does — a break that immediately stalls says something very different from one that runs. Until then, the most honest description of Spain's index is that it went up a lot, and then it waited. Analysis for discussion. Not financial advice.