Hello, Volatility
This is what markets do sometimes.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen price action like this.The S&P 500 $SPX posted its lowest close since February 21 on Monday, slipping below its 50-day moving average for the first time since November.
At 162 consecutive days above the 50-day it was the 10th-longest such streak since 1950. And we’re talking about the biggest two-day slide for the SPX in more than a year.
After rising 403.57 points intraday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 248.13 points by 4:00 p.m. ET. It was a tech-driven selloff, with the Nasdaq Composite shedding 1.79 percent.
And the CBOE Volatility Index spiked again, surging another 11.09 percent after Friday’s 16.10 percent jump.
Crude oil traded lower as investors, traders, and speculators waited for word from Israel about its response to Iran’s retaliatory strikes on targets inside its territory and then traded higher when the Israel Defense Forces said it was preparing its next steps.
Between the figurative fight against inflation and literal war in Central Europe and the Middle East, stocks have suffered an unusually difficult April.
As Eddy Elfenbein noted in a late-session post on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the stock market as represented by the S&P 500 has fallen all the way back to where it was in “those dark torpid days of late February.”
Price action is a little crazy right now, but it’s no time to panic. This is not the end of the world as we know it.
