“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

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.

This data i

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