Yesterday my good friend and colleague Keith Meyers and I recorded a brief (6 min) conversation on what has been happening in the markets of late. This is our first go at this so I/we apologize about 1) me being 2 months overdue for a haircut 2) my dog not caring that we were recording and 3) that my kids were using a lot of internet bandwidth at the same time! Interesting times for us all.
The overall point of our conversation is that markets (try) are forward looking. In March of this year the S&P 500 was negative 12.51%, this declined happened even though most states did not start to issue shelter in place mandates until mid to late March. Subsequently, April's return in the S&P 500 was positive 12.7%*. This increase happened while nearly 30 million people have filed for unemployment in the past 5 weeks and the US economy has virtually been shut down. Markets have known that economic news will be bad, and in my opinion the question is will the news be awful or bad, and is there a chance it can go from bad to not good?
In the coming days and weeks it will be interesting to see how the 'reopening' of many business's goes. Only time will tell, but we will continue to watch and evaluate. As always, if you have any questions or would like to discuss your accounts please feel free to reach out.
Stay safe and healthy!
(Note that due to sequence of returns that does not mean the S&P 500 is positive YTD - A/O 4/30/2020 the S&P 500 was -9.29% not including dividends)