Daily Covid and Markets Podcast - Thursday, April 23

The week of April 6 was the biggest “up” week in markets on a percentage basis since 1974. Last week (with up and down volatility) was another solid up week, whereas some tempering of the prior week’s rally had been expected. Coming into this week, I certainly figured some tempering of the prior two weeks rally would not be surprising, and we dropped 500-600 points Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday’s 450 point increase cut into that, and now today the Dow ended up a tad, but had been up 300 points before seeing that fade.

Futures were basically flat all night last night and stayed as such this morning from 3:15am until 5:30am when the weekly jobless claims number came. The number came in at 4.4 million, down from last week’s 5.5 million but in line with expectations, and futures went from down a bit to up 100. The market hit its high levels in the first couple hours of the day, and just slowly faded throughout the day. Energy and Alternative Asset Managers were the standouts today.

Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com