Friends
We knew we were going to see a terrible jobs number this morning and that’s exactly what we saw. We lost more than 700,000 jobs in March, and of course we know that number is going to climb quite a bit. The numbers really are just mind numbing at the moment, but of course this is a forced shutdown, so in that respect the numbers are really meaningless (but not if you are one of the ones left unemployed at the moment).
Stocks seemed to take the number in stride this morning, but as the day wore on stocks drifted further into negative territory. By the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 360 points to finish the day at 21,052 . The S&P 500 was down 38 points to close at 2,488. Gold was up $8 to trade at $1,646 per ounce, while oil was up $3.35 to trade at $28.67 per barrel WTI.
It was a difficult week on the virus news front, and even though we knew that things were going to get worse before they get better on the medical front, it is still hard to deal with. Sentiment is extremely negative right now, so it’s not surprising that markets are under duress. Hopefully over the next few weeks the news on COVID-19 starts to get a little better. Then we hopefully begin to see some clarity on how this thing might play out. We’ll continue to keep you up to date on a day by day basis. I hope that our daily “chats” are at least making all of this a little more bearable. Stay strong! We’ll get through this together.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Jim
