Friends
What began as a nice last day of the month rally, turned into a quiet but relentless end of the month selloff. There really didn’t appear to be any real catalyst for the moves today, neither the early morning rally or the afternoon selloff. After a remarkable, one might even say historic January, February really let the air out to the balloon. After the first 2 months of the year, stocks are a bit higher as measured by the S&P 500, but not much.
For the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 380 points to close at 25,029. The S&P 500 was down 30 points to close at 2713. Gold was down a fraction to trade at $1,318 per ounce, while oil was down $1.52 to trade at $61.49 per barrel WTI.
For sure, after a year where we saw little volatility, we can confidently declare that volatility is back for 2018. As mentioned, we basically are now only up slightly YTD, but given the 10% pullback in nine trading sessions that we saw in early February, it is amazing that there wasn’t more damage. Now let’s see what March has in store for us. Buckle up.
Have a nice evening everyone.
