Factor #1 in our Road to Recovery Playbook is finding confidence in the peak of COVID-19 cases in the United States.  At LPL Research we are monitoring this factor daily, and we wanted to provide an update into what we are seeing. As shown in the LPL Chart of the Day, while the number of new cases in the United States has continued to climb, the number of new cases seen outside of the US did drop in recent days before jumping again yesterday. There was positive news from Italy, the worst-hit country in terms of total deaths from the virus, as it reported on Tuesday that new cases hit a two-week low.

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The big equity bounce has continued, with the S&P 500 Index up more than 17% from the multi-year lows hit last Monday. The big question on many investors’ minds is could this be a bear market rally? After all, some of the most spectacular short-term bounces took place during bear markets.

According to our friends at Strategas Research Partners, during the 3-year bear market after the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s, the S&P 500 bounced more than 10% different 6 times on the way to falling 49.1%. During the financial crisis when the S&P 500 lost more than 56%, stocks bounced more than 10% three times, with a

Initial jobless claims came in at a record 3.3 million last week, exceeding most economist estimates. In our latest LPL Street View video, LPL Financial Chief Investment Officer Burt White breaks down big number, but also focuses on some numbers that are more important.

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We’ve been closely monitoring the details in our Road to Recovery Playbook over the past few weeks, looking for ways to opportunistically take advantage of the sharp pullback in equity prices. The Playbook consists of five factors we are scrutinizing in order to gauge progress toward the market’s bottoming process and to signal an appropriate time to get more aggressive with equity allocations. One of those factors emphasizes whether we believe there is visibility into the probability and severity of a US recession. We believe a review of the IHS Markit Flash U.S. Composite PMI™ for March 2020 provided useful insights relate