Anatomy of a Market Bottom: The April 2025 Low

Three extremes on one day

On April 4, 2025, three of Milton Berg's oversold indicators signaled simultaneously: the VIX gained 10% or more for two consecutive days; the NASDAQ Composite registered a −7% rate of change over three days; and the NASDAQ 100 produced a 5-day volume extreme not seen in at least 200 days.

Each of those readings is rare on its own. Panic-grade volatility expansion, a compressed three-day collapse in prices, and a volume surge of a kind absent for the better part of a year — arriving together, they are the statistical signature of capitulation, not of an ordinary pullback.

The swarm that followed

What happened next is the part most investors never see. Two more signals fired on April 7, four on April 8, and fifty-seven on April 9. Two followed on April 10, four on April 11, five on April 22, one on April 23, nine on April 24, two on April 25, and six on April 30.

Any individual signal in that list may have only three or four historical precedents. But collectively the cluster corresponded to more than 45 prior market dates — a far broader foundation than any single model could provide. In Berg's framework, that swarm is the signal.

Projecting the advance

Berg does not forecast targets from intuition. On April 4, two of his models registered buy signals that had appeared on four prior dates in history. Across those four precedents, the median maximum S&P 500 gain before the next 10% correction was +33.17% — projecting to roughly 6,757 — and the average was +40.94%, projecting to roughly 7,152.

As of the interview (market data through mid-March 2026), the S&P 500 had advanced +37.53% from the April 4, 2025 signal date to 6,968.60 — between the two projections — without an intervening 10% correction.

The honest caveat applies here as everywhere: four precedents is a small sample, and a historical median is a description of the past, not a promise about the future. What the episode demonstrates is the method — projections derived mechanically from the specific signals in place, stated in advance, and checkable afterward.

The April 24 confirmation

Three weeks after the low, a different kind of signal fired: concentrated momentum. The NASDAQ Composite gained +2.74% on April 24 after +2.50% on April 23, while the S&P 500 rose +2.03% and +1.67% on those days following +2.55% on April 22. That combination — two consecutive NASDAQ gains of +1.90% or more together with three consecutive S&P 500 gains of +1.60% or more — had occurred only five times before in the historical record.

In each prior case, the maximum S&P 500 gain over the following 12 months ranged from +20.51% to +34.40% — and, just as important, the preceding bear-market low was never breached. That precedent is what let Berg's institutional work treat the prior lows as a floor, positioning portfolios to participate in the kind of rally that has historically followed such momentum bursts.

The hard part is acting

April 2025 also illustrates the behavioral trap. The market turned sharply higher straight off the low — April 8, 2025 joins March 9, 2009, December 24, 2018, and March 23, 2020 on Berg's list of V-shaped turns that never offered a comfortable retest. Investors waiting for a second chance to buy never got one.

Berg's rule for such moments is characteristically short: “When the models say go, do not second-guess.”