See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium.  CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.

“Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don’t speak bird.” – Kurt Cobain

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Futures have been attempting to recover from yesterday afternoon’s sell-off.  International indices are sharply lower as they were closed before the selling got underway here.  Where the market finishes today will hinge in large part on the March employment report which just hit the tape.  Non-farm payrolls came in stronger than expected at 303K versus forecasts for an increase of 214K. The Unemployment Rate was right in line with forecasts at 3.8% as was average hourly earnings which increased 4.1%. The average workweek was modestly longer than expected at 34.4  hours vs. forecasts for 34.3. In reaction to the report, equity futures sold off a bit, and yields increased with the 10-year just under 4.4%.

In yesterday’s Closer, we provided a detailed discussion of Thursday’s reversal in the Nasdaq including its potential drivers (When you boil it down can anyone ever really definitively tell you what the actual cause of any market move is?).  This morning, we wanted to take a wider-angle view and look at every time since 1989 (as far back as we have intraday Nasdaq data available) that the Nasdaq experienced a similar reversal to yesterday.

Since 1989, there have been 122 prior days where the Nasdaq was up 1% intraday and finished the day down over 1%.  As mentioned last night, many of these days have tended to occur during bear markets. After all, it’s more common for rallies to run out of steam during bear markets than bull markets.  When you don’t tend to see these types of reversals is during a bull market when the Nasdaq is right near 52-week highs.

There have now been just ten days since 1989 when the Nasdaq was up 1% intraday and finished the day down 1%.  As shown in the chart below, two of those days were in early 1999, a year before the peak of the dot-com bubble.  Another two occurred in early 2020, including one on 3/7/00, just three days before the Nasdaq’s intraday peak of that era. The next two occurrences were in 2003 as the market was coming out of the bear market from the internet bubble. After those two days, there were no other reversals of a similar magnitude for seventeen years (7/13/2020 and 11/9/2020), and before yesterday, the most recent occurrence was less than a month ago on March 8th.  Is it just us, or does anyone else find it weird that these reversals tended to come in pairs?  In every year where there was a reversal, there was always another and not a single more.

Read today’s entire Morning Lineup.

For more analysis of global equities and economic readings released this morning, read today’s full Morning Lineup with a two-week Bespoke Premium trial.

See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium.  CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.” – Bill Gates

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

While the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 all managed to post gains yesterday, the DJIA closed lower for its third day in a row.  That streak may come to an end today, though, as futures are higher across the board. The only notable data point of the morning was jobless claims. Initial claims came in higher than expected (221K vs 214K) and hit the highest level since late January while continuing claims fell back below 1.8 million versus forecasts for a reading just above that level (1.791 mln vs 1.810 mln). Besides the employment data ahead of tomorrow’s jobs report, there are also a ton of Fed speakers on the calendar today, so by the end of the day we should have a much better idea of the prospects of a June rate cut, which currently stands at just about a coin flip.

Happy Birthday to the “Blue Screen of Death”.  The world’s largest company, Microsoft (MSFT), turns 49 years old today as it was founded on this day in 1975 in Albuquerque, NM by Paul Allen and Bill Gates.  Of the six US publicly traded companies with trillion-dollar market caps, MSFT is the oldest followed by Apple (AAPL) which was founded nearly two years to the day later. The chart below of the Nasdaq shows the dates that each member of the trillion-dollar club was founded.

It’s interesting to note that not even one of the largest US companies is 50 years old. The youngest of the six is Meta Platforms (META), but it won’t be legal to toast its membership for another ten months as it only turned twenty two months ago. People will tell you that while the 1980s were a lot of fun, not much good came out of them, and that’s also the case with the largest companies. After AAPL was founded in 1976, there was a 17-year lull before the next member, Nvidia (NVDA), was founded in 1993.  Just over a year after that, Amazon.com (AMZN) was founded in 1994. That was the same year that Katie Couric, Bryant Gumble, and Elizabeth Vargas asked each other, “What is internet?”.  Look who’s laughing now!

Read today’s entire Morning Lineup.

For more analysis of global equities and economic readings released this morning, read today’s full Morning Lineup with a two-week Bespoke Premium trial.