Investor’s can smell the scent of the green….
And THEY are supply their own brief good news?
US stocks rose on Thursday, notching the first three-day rally since February, after the Senate passed a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.
The Dow Jones industrial average surged 6.2% — or 1,352 points — to extend its three-day surge to 21%. That means the index has officially reentered a bull market just weeks after the last one ended.
Optimism around the package offset a dismal US weekly jobless-claims report showing that a record 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending March 21. That figure exceeded economists’ expectations and provided a jarring sign of just how big of an effect the coronavirus pandemic will have on the US economy.
Here’s where the major US indexes stood at the market close on Thursday:
- S&P 500: 2,630.07, up 6.2%
- Dow Jones industrial average: 22,552.17, up 6.4% (1,352 points)
- Nasdaq composite: 7,797.54, up 5.6%
“I am shocked that the markets, for whatever reason, rallied on that,” Randy Frederick, vice president of Trading and Derivatives at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, told Business Insider in an interview.
He continued: “We have been in the last couple of days in an environment where we’ve seen the market go up on bad news and volatility come down. That is a potential sign of a bottoming process.”
Even though economists across Wall Street were braced for a huge spike in jobless claims, “the information is worrying,” Seema Shah, the chief strategist at Principal Global Investors, told Business Insider in an email.
“The further unemployment rises, the deeper the economic downturn will be and the longer it will last as productive capacity is eroded,” she said….