Markets posted their best week in decades, with the S&P 500 up more than 12%. Monday’s gain of 7% fueled most of this gain and was the first week since February, we haven’t seen a day the S&P 500 lost more than 1%. Gains were driven in part by coronavirus optimism, the Fed announcing its plans to provide $2.3T in new lending support, and rumors (and then news later in the week) that oil production would be scaled back, ending the price war triggered by Russia and Saudi Arabia at the end of Q1. Initial jobless claims continued to remain at historically high levels, with 6.6M people filing for initial claims last week and bringing the total to nearly 17M over three weeks. We could see double-digit unemployment rates, exacerbated by the slow rollout of the small business loan-to-grant programs, which have been riddled with technical problems and long wait times. While global new confirmed COVID-19 cases are still modestly elevated from last week, they are increasing at a slower percentage rate leading to some optimism that the tide may be turning in the crisis. Though it is too early to say either way as grim news continued with global deaths likely to surpass 100K this week and deaths in New York more than doubled in a week, passing 7K on Thursday. In politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the Democratic primary, paving the way for a smooth convention and nomination for Biden. We’ve received a fair amount of questions related to emotional investing and how to approach situations where clients may have traded based on reasonable fears over the last few weeks. We discussed this in our latest Due Dilly Podcast (link), so check it out if you are having similar conversations with your clients.
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