Some calm is returning to Wall Street, and US stocks are holding steadier after Japan’s market soared earlier Tuesday to bounce back from its worst loss since 1987.
The S&P 500 was 0.2 per cent higher in early trading and on track to break a brutal three-day losing streak. It had tumbled a bit more than 6 per cent after several weaker-than-expected reports raised worries the Federal Reserve had pressed the brakes too hard for too long on the US economy through high interest rates in order to beat inflation.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 47 points, or 0.1 per cent, as of 9:43 am Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3 per cent lower.
Stronger-than-expected profit reports from several big US companies helped support the market. Kenvue, the company behind Tylenol and Band-Aids, jumped 13.5 per cent after reporting stronger profit than expected thanks in part to higher prices for its products. Uber rolled 4.3 per cent higher after easily topping profit forecasts for the latest quarter. Caterpillar veered from an early loss to a gain of 1.7 per cent after reporting stronger earnings than expected but weaker revenue.
Several technical factors may have accelerated the recent swoon for markets, beyond the weak US hiring data and other reports, in what strategists at Barclays call “a perfect storm” for causing extreme market moves. One is centred in Tokyo, where a favourite trade for hedge funds and other investors began unravelling last week after the Bank of Japan made borrowing more expensive by raising interest rates above virtually zero.
That scrambled trades where investors had borrowed Japanese yen at low cost and invested it elsewhere around the world. The resulting exits from those trades may have helped accelerate the declines for markets around the world.
But Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 10.2 per cent Tuesday, following its 12.4 per cent sell-off the day before, which was its worst since the Black Monday crash of 1987. Stocks in Tokyo rebounded as the value of the Japanese yen stabilised a bit against the US dollar following several days of sharp gains.
“The speed, the magnitude and the shock factor clearly demonstrate” how much of the moves were driven by how traders were positioned, rather than just worries about the economy, according to the strategists at Barclays led by Stefano Pascale and Anshul Gupta.
Still, some voices along Wall Street are continuing to urge caution.
Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel, is warning more drops could be ahead because of a slowing US economy and sticky inflation. He had been predicting a coming “correction” in US stock prices for a while, including an acknowledgement in July that his initial call was early. That was two days before the S&P 500 set its latest all-time high and then began sinking.
While fears are rising about a slowing US economy, it is still growing, and a recession is far from a certainty. The US stock market is also still up a healthy amount for the year so far. The S&P 500 has romped to dozens of all-time highs this year, in part due to a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology and critics have been saying prices looked too expensive.
Elsewhere, European markets were mostly left out of the rebound, with stock indexes down modestly in Germany France and the United Kingdom.
