The big money is calling a halt to the surge in stock prices.
Declines in oil and metals prices are being seen by an increasing number of fund managers and strategists as a signal to get out of riskier areas of the equity market. And that means avoiding things like Chinese IPOs and sticking to the boring stuff, like utilities.
The growing concern is that stocks had priced in an overly optimistic economic path, and the recent breakdown in commodities and shift in equities to safer industries like health care suggest a reckoning in coming months.
Ken Fisher, founder of Fisher Investments which manages about $38 billion in equities. is among those concerned many investors have become overconfident. However, some say there is room for the market to move higher before taking a turn for the worse.
Bullish investors point to robust first quarter earnings. Just under three quarters of S&P 500 companies beat Wall Street's earnings estimates and investors have pointed to sturdy revenue growth. The S&P's index of retail stocks recently hit all-time highs.
Next week there will be earnings from some important retailers, including the nation's largest, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, home improvement companies Lowe's Companies and Home Depot, as well as teen clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch.
Prominent strategists at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse foresee better results for stocks less tied to the economic cycle. Doug Cliggott, head of equity strategy at Credit Suisse, wrote: "Gone is the US equity performance profile that suggested bold optimism on growth."
Commodities have been at the forefront of the selling so far. Big rallies in hard assets such as gold, silver and oil ended in an ugly slump last week. Silver crashed 30 percent in its worst fall since 1980. Oil, which was until recently worrying investors with its sharp ascent, fell around 15 percent.
There are two schools of thought as to why commodities are slumping. One is that the Federal Reserve's $600 billion program to buy Treasury debt has helped investors divert funds to commodities and equities, creating a bubble in those assets, which is now starting to burst.
The S&P 500's healthcare and utilities sectors were the performance leaders over the last month, rising 2.9 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively. That's despite a 1.5 percent fall in year-over-year earnings growth in utilities in the first quarter, worst of the S&P's 10 sectors.
Healthcare, long a go-nowhere sector, has had a whopping rally. The sector has gained for seven straight weeks, and is up 14.9 percent this year, best of the 10 S&P sectors. Energy, down 7.8 percent in the last seven weeks, is the worst performer in that time.
Goldman Sachs says it has become "much less confident in the near-term equity picture," exiting what it called its "top trade" in US banks, and doing the same with a trade that was long industrial shares relative to consumer staples.
Cliggott sees a 10 percent decline at the end of the Fed's so-called QE2 stimulus program - which is what happened at the end of the first round of Fed buying - as the "base case" scenario. The firm continues to recommend a short financial/long health care trade, as well as a long consumer staples/short consumer discretionary trade.
EPFR Global, which tracks fund flows, said Friday that global equity funds experienced their first outflow since mid-March.
Small and mid-cap stocks, which typically lead a strong market, have started to see their relative outperformance to large caps wane. Meanwhile, momentum indicators show the strength in S&P 500 is starting to decline as well. There are also signs of fatigue in the IPO market after a flood of Chinese IPOs and leveraged buyouts at the start of the year.
Shares of Chinese dating website Jiayuan.com fell in their Nasdaq debut, while social networking site Renren, dubbed China's Facebook, reversed all its gains on its market debut and traded below its offer price.
Goldman argues stocks have been driven further than economic fundamentals justify by heightened risk appetite. Sentiment indicators are elevated but off highs earlier in the year, while the CBOE Volatility Index, or Vix,is at pre-financial crisis levels, signs investors may be getting complacent.