A lot of digital ink has been spilled and endless TV hours spent fretting about why the Dow industrials dropped so hard this month. Suddenly the old average gets a bounce and all that chatter is wasted.

I knew the explanation would be simple and the bounce last week proves it. Sometimes there is no news. The market simply moves on its own momentum . . . stocks moving like planets in their orbits, approaching and receding in the investor sky.

It’s not drama. It isn’t even politics. It’s just business. But human beings need narratives and will take heroic measures to concoct them in the absence of a compelling story.

What happened last month? Stocks got ahead of themselves. Overheated. Like the sky, there are scientific rules that govern market probability. And like the sky the weather in the market will always come with its share of shocks and surprises, but it generally follows statistical trends: warmer in some seasons, rainier in others.

At the end of November, the market was due a storm. Relief buying after the election had gone too far, leaving the bulls exhausted. And there weren’t a lot of sure bets beyond the Magnificent 7. In the absence of tangible good news or at least a little courage, most stocks were set up to take a fall.

They took that fall. But something interesting happened. Key stocks and the Dow itself stepped down exactly to the middle of their current channel and then the buying started again. People were waiting for a dip and they jumped in when they got it.

I’m defining that channel on the Dow as the band between the recent top and the 200-day moving average, which tracks roughly where the blue-chip benchmark has been over the trailing year. Call that “neutral” or “normal.” It’s where the bulls and bears meet.

And right now, the bulls and bears meet on the bull side of that line. The buyers came in 4% above the moving average and quickly recovered short-term support. The Dow is now within 5% of breaking records. Does that feel like the free fall that all the stories about a crisis of confidence in healthcare or regulatory trouble for Big Tech point at?

Given all those stories, you’d expect to see the index crashing. But look at NVIDIA. Similar fall from grace. People blamed China but I thought that was suspicious because as you’ll recall, Washington already bans China from buying the hottest chips.

There’s no market threat here. It’s like an Amish community banning a gas station chain and someone telling you that’s why oil stocks are down.

And even in that scenario, how do you explain NVDA bouncing 10% after it hit the halfway point? People were waiting for a dip. This was as low as they dared to dream they’d get in.

That isn’t bear mentality. There’s no buyer strike here. No sell signal. All I’m seeing is an occasional absence of buy signals . . . and the market providing its own buy signal in the form of “buying the dip.”

The question is whether these stocks break records on the next upswing. For the Dow, the floor is rising at a gentle slope of about 0.3% per week, which doesn’t create a lot of pressure on the ceiling.

On a stock like NVDA, the floor is coming up at 4X that speed. With that in mind, I’m thinking January will give us the test. And January, needless to say, is when earnings season starts. That’s where the market will get all the good or bad news it needs to make real decisions . . . and not just ride the waves.