@theMarket: The Stock Market Is Not the Economy

If ever one needed an example of the above saying, today's market would prove that point. Friday's unemployment figure for the month of April revealed that 20.3 million Americans are out of work, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent. The stock market gained more than one percent on the news.

 

While new cases of COVID-19 are reported and deaths multiply with no cure or vaccine in sight, the NASDAQ turned positive for the year. Corporate earnings have been abysmal and future guidance nonexistent for most companies, but their stocks went up anyway. How can this be, you might ask?

 

As I have said before, the stock market is a forward-looking mechanism. As such, investors are looking beyond this troubling period and anticipating that earnings, and ultimately the economy, will recover. At that point, we could see a typical "sell on the good news" event, but not now.

 

The economic data gave us some additional information on the victims of the pandemic. For one thing, the jobless rate would have been higher (by about another five percentage points), if workers had not classified themselves as "absent from work" instead of unemployed. Still, it was the largest, single monthly decline since record-keeping began back in 1948.

 

The leisure and hospitality industries led the declines, although every industry category experienced job losses. The majority of jobs lost were in low-paying areas indicating that wage earners at the bottom of the scale are taking the brunt of the virus fallout. It also explains why the average hourly wage gain suddenly increased by 4.7 percent, since, with so many low wage earners gone, those with higher wages predominate in the survey.

 

None of that mattered to the markets. From a financial point of view, the actions of the central bank in pouring trillions of new dollars into the financial system are why stocks continue to run. The Fed has all but nationalized the country's debt markets by buying or at least guaranteeing that they will be the buyer of last resort.

 

This week, I suspect that many investors, who tend to follow the headlines in making investment decisions (big mistake), and who sold during the recent downturn have been waiting for a chance to get back in on a re-test of those lows. threw in the towel. Those stock chasers are rushing back into the market now (and are probably late as usual).

 

One of the worries I have, however, is the overly large concentration of buying in a handful of mega stocks, especially the FANG names. The action is similar to the frenzied FOMO buying experienced at times when marijuana stocks or the meatless burger was "hot." I hope to see a broadening out of buying interest into more sectors and securities in order to feel more comfortable in the short-term.

 

Otherwise, like always, readers should soon expect to see some kind of corrective pattern descend upon the equity markets. We did have a 2-3 day sell off totaling about 4 percent from the highs a little over a week ago. The same thing could happen next week or the week after. That is the price of doing business in the stock market. The point is that until new data can show conclusively that the COVID-19 virus is on the waning, there will be that on-going risk of a 10 percent pullback. So, what?