Friday March 13, 2020….Stock’s start slightly positive …..Tech wave is coming?…

Stocks rebounded on Friday from their worst day in more than 30 years, a rally pinned partly to signs of movement in Washington and a declaration by leaders in Germany, which has Europe’s biggest economy, to spend whatever it would take to support businesses there.

By late morning in New York, the S&P 500 was up about 3 percent.

The buying also swept through markets in Europe, with major indexes rising as much as 10 percent. Oil prices, which have collapsed in recent weeks, rose 7 percent and yields on U.S. government bonds rose.

All of those moves were signals that investors felt a touch better about the outlook for the economy than they did a day ago.

But financial markets have been nothing if not inconsistent for the past three weeks, plunging, and then rising, and then plunging again, as each day brought new measures to try to contain the outbreak and new worries that the economy, workers and businesses would take a hit as a result of them.

On Thursday, stocks on Wall Street and in Europe plunged in their biggest daily drop since the stock market crashed in 1987, as President Trump’s ban on entry from most European countries to the United States disappointed investors who had been waiting for Washington to take stronger steps to bolster the economy.

But late Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that she and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had “resolved most of our differences” on a package of economic aid for workers and companies, pledging a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday…..

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Increasingly, most corporate work can be done from home, with few drawbacks. The Barron’s newsroom uses Slack to stay in touch minute by minute and Google Hangouts to hold video meetings with reporters across the country. Our staff meetings could be carried out over Hangouts without anyone physically present in the office. We have a good remote strategy in place. Coronavirus could force companies across the country to hone their own plans in the coming weeks.

Some experts suggest the virus may pull forward a trend that was going to happen anyway: “We could see a longer-term acceleration in enabling information worker productivity outside the traditional office environment,” Citi Research analyst Walter Pritchard wrote on Thursday.

David Nelson, chief strategist at Belpointe Asset Management, says the outbreak may force companies to rethink the way they do business. “I know a lot of companies that have a lot of employees out on the road,” he says. “Frankly, they don’t need to be on the road that much, as a lot of what they do doesn’t require an in-person meeting.”

Late this week, Amazon.com (AMZN) told its employees to avoid all nonessential travel for now, including within the U.S. Much of that travel could be replaced by video calls.

Nelson expects more companies to ask their employees to work from home in the coming weeks. The market has already discounted some of the potential behavioral changes. Zoom Video shares have risen 47% over the past month and are now trading at nearly 40 times forward sales. That may be a bit too high to chase, but other workforce collaboration tools should do just as well….

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