Thirty Million

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How heartening to see that, for once, bad news actually is considered bad news. With this morning’s unemployment report showing now over 30 million out of work (a number surely to get higher), there’s actually red across the board, including the most important one to me, small caps.

rtyw

Indeed, the entire idiotic “the virus is cured!” rise from yesterday has been laid waste. From what I understand, the Gilead news was so puffed-up and overblown as to be almost criminal.

esdown

Let’s say I wanted Slope of Hope to be public. That was my goal. And let’s also say yesterday I got three new subscribers. Does that help me toward my goal? Absolutely. Is it a meaningful data point? Not at all. It’s virtually inconsequential. That’s my take on the “huge” GILD news from yesterday. Absolutely and total B.S.

The one market you would think would be soaring to record highs today would be the NASDAQ, since Tesla, Microsoft, and Facebook all blew the doors off with earnings yesterday. Well, that entire earnings-mania rise is also now gone.

nw

As I was looking at ETF and index charts last night, the date that kept coming up again and again was the March 6-9 price gap. What took place that weekend (which, I believe, was when OPEC fell apart) was a key inflection point. After this completely absurd rally over the past five weeks, we have just about sealed that gap. Here’s the Dow Industrials, for instance.

slopechart INDU

Here is the Russell 2000 small cap index.

slopechart RUT

Here is the oil and gas sector.

slopechart XOI

I will continue to keep things light, almost to the point of clinical paranoia, but I applaud the fact that a handful of people are actually recognizing that having the entire country out of work isn’t a lovely thing.