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Over the past few weeks, we've looked multiple times at the thrusts and recoveries not only in stocks and major indexes in the U.S., but also worldwide. It keeps going.

We've added a multitude of indicators in recent weeks to help monitor the health of industries, sectors, and worldwide markets, and they're starting to show meaningful changes in tone.

In March, every major world index we follow was in a bear market, and now fewer than 15% of them are. In recent decades, that only happened in 1988 and 2009.

Overall, similar but less extreme recoveries preceded some choppy conditions for the MSCI World Index over the next couple of months, but they resolved higher over the next 6-12 months. All of them could be considered major recoveries.

It was a good sign for domestic stocks, too. The S&P 500 was higher a year later every time.

Related but different, for more than 50 days, not a single major world index we follow managed to close above its 200-day average, and now more than 30% of them have. Again, mostly a good sign worldwide.

And domestically.

Among the 11 major U.S. sectors, all of them were in bear markets in March. Now, only one of them is. In the past 30 years, we've seen this kind of broad sector movement only at the ends of the last two protracted bear markets.

Drilling down to the U.S. industry level, almost every one of the 23 industries was in a bear market in March, now fewer than 20% of them are. This is quite a bit broader than the sector data, but with the same two precedents.

It's hard to compare what was basically a one-month bear market to the lasting devastation in 2001 and 2008, but the types of breadth readings witnessed each time is comparable. Maybe on a more compacted time frame, but similar severity. Like we saw with the thrusts and recoveries earlier this week, it's hard to ignore the positive long-term implications.

Despite the gloomy headlines, economic reports have been better than expected. Thanks in large part to reports that were much better than economists' guesses on the labor market (which continued on Friday in a massive way), the overall tone of economic surprises have turned positive after the worst reading in history just a few weeks ago.

Bloomberg's version of economic surprises generally tracks well with Citigroup's, and we can see that among individual components, labor market surprises have helped push up the overall indicator.

There is a strong tendency to link economics and markets, which is usually a mistake. While it sounds good in theory that improving economics, relative to expectations, should drive stocks higher, it was inconsistent as a driver of forward returns for the S&P 500.

It was not so great for bonds. 10-year Treasury futures often got slammed after these reversals.

The dollar tended to sink right away, then was mixed.

Because the dollar tended to sink shorter-term, it benefited gold, but after that, there was no clear pattern.

With continued improvement in the labor indicators, we'll likely see the various economic surprise indicators jump in the days ahead. They will be shared far and wide, and assumed to be continued good news for stocks. For the most part, it is a positive, but a minor one only. 

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