Don't be fooled by daily drama. The stock market is in a rut.

It might not exactly feel like it, but the stock market has been, well, kind of boring.

The choppiness and seemingly constant mid-session about-faces are obscuring the bigger picture: the S&P 500 has been vacillating within a roughly 100-point range over the past two weeks. It has stayed above 4,050 since the end of May and pushed over 4,160 earlier in the week, a level it’s had difficulty sustaining. It was around 4,117 on Wednesday afternoon in New York.

“We’re trapped in a range,” Anastasia Amoroso, the chief investment strategist at iCapital, told Bloomberg TV, saying investors are trying to decide what the fair value of the market is. “How much are you going to pay for US$235 worth of earnings? 16.5x is fair. Maybe 17.5x is fair, which is roughly where we are today,” she said. “But how much more do you push that?”