Market Freezes Within Minutes of Opening as COVID-19 Pushes S&P 500, Stocks Down Further [Updated]

Wall Street opened the week of March 16 to Monday morning carnage, as COVID-19 triggered a quick circuit breaker during the opening minutes of the trading day as the S&P 500 and other stocks slid down further.

Trading halted at 9:31 AM, 1 minute into the trading day as the S&P 500 crossed the threshold of 7%. Before the trading day started the S&P 500 was down pre-market 9%.

After trading resumed, losses continued to mount up the S&P 500 diving another 3 percentage points.

In the first few minutes of trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 9.7%. The NASDAQ Composite Index was lower by 6%.

Even before the market opened on Monday, futures contracts for the major averages hit their “limit down” levels, meaning they could not trade below that threshold and trading was halted until the market opened.

All this is after the Fed's second emergency rate cut this month, which was disclosed over the weekend. Investors, however, didn't think much of the Fed's move and data shows that they are moving capital into US government bonds which are considered to be some of the most solid investments in the world. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell 0.19%, to less than 0.7% in Monday trading.

Before the US market opened, China disclosed that the COVID-19 virus has decimated its economy quantifying the damage done. The National Bureau of Statistics said that industrial output had dropped 13.5% for the first two months of the year effectivley signalling that the economy had shut down during the worst of the pandemic. Unemployment has also jumped to 6.2%, with retail sales dropping 20% on year. All in all, the economy experienced its first quarterly contraction since 1989.

More to come...

 

 

The post Market Freezes Within Minutes of Opening as COVID-19 Pushes S&P 500, Stocks Down Further [Updated] by Sam Reynolds appeared first on Wccftech.



Refference- https://wccftech.com

Post a Comment

0 Comments