Over the past few weeks, investors may have been introduced to a new term they weren’t previously familiar with: circuit breakers. Today, we answer a few simple questions about circuit breakers:

What is a circuit break? A circuit breaker is a built-in temporary halt or momentary pause in trading in the stock market.

What are the triggers for a circuit breaker? There are three levels, or thresholds, at which trading will pause, and they are based on movement in the S&P 500 Index. Level 1 occurs when the S&P 500 declines at least 7% from its closing price the day before. Level 2 occurs if the index drops

With US equities firmly in a bear market, even the most long-term investors are now looking ahead to when the selling may stop and where the S&P 500 Index might ultimately bottom. “Nobody knows exactly how this market bottom will play out,” said LPL Financial Senior Market Strategist Ryan Detrick. “However, using history as guide, we know markets tend to retest or even slightly break previous lows.”

We took a look at how markets have bottomed for two previous bear markets that show similarities to the current sell-off, in terms of speed and magnitude. As shown in the chart below, following Black Monday

We rolled out our Road to Recovery Playbook at the start of the week to help investors gauge where the market is in its bottoming process. The first and most important piece of that playbook—visibility into a peak in new COVID-19 cases—remains elusive, but we hope to have a clearer picture with the next couple of weeks as containment efforts have more time to work. We continue to monitor cases daily and plan to update you on that progress regularly during this crisis.

We’re getting closer to checking off the other four boxes. We would just like to see a bit more economic data consistent with recession—almo

After recording two double-digit drops in equity prices over the last three trading days, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has sent world equity markets into bear market territory. The result is a cumulative 30% drop in the S&P 500 Index in just under 30 days. Though daunting, once the market finds a bottom, which is where the index begins to consistently move higher than the previous market low—and we believe it is “when” not “if” the market finds a bottom—it may   provide an attractive opportunity for long-term investors to consider adding risk to portfolios. 

Given all the