A Market Cave-In Ahead of the Holidays
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
With your money briefing, I'm Charlie Turner in New York for The Wall Street Journal.
How bad was this week's market sell-off and which indexes were hit hardest?
Stocks had their worst week in years as investors continued to deal with a bunch of concerns. On Friday, the Dow Industrials fell 414 points to 22,445.
How much did the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq fall on Friday and for the week?
The Nasdaq Composite lost 195 points, or 3%, and the S&P 500 fell 50 points. The NASDAQ fell 8.4% for the week, the worst week since 2008. NASDAQ is now in bear market territory, down more than 20% from its late August high. Both the Dow and S&P fell about 7%, with the Dow also having its worst week in a decade. Here to explain the market swoon for us is The Wall Street Journal's Mike Worsthorn. Mike, the selling this week has been amazing, but I'm wondering, isn't a lot of this competition
Is algorithmic and automated selling driving the recent market plunge?
Computer-driven selling where investors can unload millions of shares in a second or two. That's what it seems to me.
You certainly have the algorithmic component to the stock market right now. And that's something that's always there. And you see it get especially heightened like it did this past week. When you have things like some of the major indexes moving above and below their 50 or 200-day moving averages, some of these key technical thresholds, because those are how the algorithms are tracking these indexes and deciding whether they should buy or sell something. So you see the algos pick up, and it's not even just the algos. You can have, say, a retail investor, and if they're in an index tracking fund for, say, the NASDAQ, they might set a market sell limit order. And that would just be something that's always in effect.
And that would sort of send a signal that if the NASDAQ crosses a certain threshold, maybe something like when it entered into bear market territory on Friday, that it would just automatically sell that. And I had a number of investors tell me that there was quite a bit of automation taking sort of the control there. But even then, worse on top of that is that there wasn't any algorithms willing to buy at that point or retail investors on top of that. The Fed's interest rate hikes really have investors spooked, don't they, at this point? And a lot of it has to do with the messaging that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said around these interest rate increases. You know, the market is nervous that the Fed would sort of blindly raise interest rates all throughout next year, so much so that you could cause the economy to just sort of overheat
Are Federal Reserve rate hikes fueling fears of a 2019 recession?
and suddenly slowed down. And that's what's contributing to these bigger fears of a possible recession in 2019. Now, even though Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had made clear that we're only going to do two rate hikes next year, that was still enough to spook the markets into thinking that the Fed is sort of on this linear trajectory with their interest rate hikes.
Are the rate hikes making investors think twice about the health of the U.S. economy? I mean, that's the thinking that I get. The U.S. economy is still strong. We had an update, the final update, I believe, for the third quarter, and it was 3.4 percent growth. The GDP is still not bad, but I think investors must be thinking that the interest rates are definitely going to really impact the economy, even though it's widely accepted that the economy is going to slow down next year anyway.
That's what's contributing to these diverging views if you talk to, say, an average investor, somebody in the Fed, and say even a company executive. The possibility of rising interest rates, what investors are realizing is that you had a decade where interest rates were near zero. You had a lot of debt and it was easy to take on. It was basically free money for a lot of companies and a lot of people. Now that they're confronting these higher interest rates and they don't really know where they're going to stop, they're realizing their cost of servicing that debt is going to go up dramatically.
What should investors expect during the holiday‑shortened trading week?
in those months ahead. And that's why you've seen, say, in the case of small capitalization companies, I mean, they were already in a bear market earlier in the week.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:10
2
How bad was this week's market sell-off and which indexes were hit hardest?
0:10–0:20
3
How much did the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq fall on Friday and for the week?
0:20–0:53
4
Is algorithmic and automated selling driving the recent market plunge?
0:53–2:28
5
Are Federal Reserve rate hikes fueling fears of a 2019 recession?
2:28–3:42
6
What should investors expect during the holiday‑shortened trading week?
3:42–4:22
7
Where might the market bottom be and when could buyers return?
4:22–5:48
8
Which sectors are weakest now—small caps, tech, or energy—and why?
5:48–7:03
Speakers
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