(This story is part of the Weekend Brief edition of the Evening Brief newsletter. To sign up for CNBC's Evening Brief, click here.) This month has become a sideways "slowvember" slide in recent weeks, with stocks remarkably steady near record highs, as investors are again left to wonder if the tape is resting or rolling over. The August lows in both the S&P 500 and 10-year Treasury yields continue to look like consequential bottoms, reflecting a late-summer overshoot to the downside for both in a fit of global recession panic that now appears to have been premature and left most investors defensive and unprepared for a quick rebound. Yet the relief rally that led to a surge in bond yields and cyclical stocks has receded a bit, and short-term gauges of investor sentiment became stretched, restraining the indexes in a narrow band in recent weeks. Restrained, but so far resilient: Dips have been shallow, with the index halting declines just below the 3,100 mark. For the past two weeks, the S&P has hovered in about a 1% range between 3,090 and 3,122. The action resembles what occurred for a few weeks in September, when the S&P hugged the 3,000 level after a 6%, one-month rebound. It eventually gave way to a choppy 3% setback before a slingshot move higher into November, largely tracking reports of trade-deal progress or its lack.

S&P 500, 1-year:

Short-term trader sentiment has become a bit too bullish, arguably, with scant demand for downside put protection and the spread between bulls and bears in the weekly Investors Intelligence poll of advisory services reaching the upper end of its multi-year range — though nowhere near the giddy heights of January 2018..

Overbought?

The climb to new highs was sharp and persistent enough to make the major indexes overbought — meaning they had extended far above a longer-term trend, a sign both of impressive momentum and vulnerability to a quick setback. This Bespoke Investment Group plot of the S&P 500 relative to its 50-day average shows the tape coming off the boil without much damage at all in terms of broad-market downside yet. Source: Bespoke Investment Group Canaccord Genuity strategist Tony Dwyer, who remains bullish on stocks heading into 2020, nonetheless has been looking for a downside jolt of somewhere less than 5% to reset sentiment and refresh buying appetites through lower prices. "Over the past two weeks, the market has been correcting internally and it may finally begin showing up in the major market indices," Dwyer notes. Some corrections remain stealthy and subsurface, of course, sparing the marquee indexes packed with a mix of secular-growth and defensive stocks as well as industrials and financials.

Leaders have slowed