Following last week’s more than 10% gain, the S&P 500 Index is tracking toward another weekly loss, its fifth of the last seven. This has many investors wondering if a retest of the lows may be in the cards for US equities. As we explored in our How Markets Bottom post, two of the bear markets we believe show the most similarities to our current one did retest or undercut the lows after the worst of the selling.

“Whether or not we get a retest is an open question,” said LPL Financial Senior Market Strategist Ryan Detrick. “But we believe we’ve seen the worst of the selling, and we will be watchin

More than 6 million people filed new claims for unemployment in the week ending March 28. It’s hard to capture what a number like that means. Last week’s 3.3 million new claims was already almost five times the previous high of 695,000, reached in 1982. Economists’ consensus for this morning’s number was 3.8 million, which still would have been about triple the largest weekly increase ever before last week. The 6.6 million new unemployment claims reported today is once again off the charts. But the almost unimaginable second surge doesn’t mean we didn’t understand the costs of efforts to contain the COVID-1

“Could there be another depression” is one of the top questions we’ve received over the past week. “Yes, we are in a recession and many are worried if things may get much worse before they get better,” explained LPL Financial Senior Market Strategist Ryan Detrick. “But we continue to think the double-barrel of support from the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the $2 trillion CARES Act should help to provide a bridge for consumers and small businesses to help get them to the other side of this slowdown. Once things pick up, the second half of this year could see explosive growth as a result.”

So

With the US economy having entered recession, investors were braced for weak manufacturing data today. The report released this morning at 10am ET clearly showed the pandemic has negatively impacted the sector, but the headline number was actually quite a bit better than economists had forecast.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing dipped to 49.1 in March, down from 50.1 in February, as shown in the chart below. The reading is consistent with only modestly slower manufacturing activity, and is well above the low 40s levels historically consistent with recession-type le