Dip-buyers are testing the waters on Tuesday, fishing for deals in digital currencies, tech stocks, and crude.
That’s pushing U.S. Futures into the green a day after a brutal $1.3 trillion selloff plunged the benchmark S&P 500 officially into bear territory, and wiped out all gains made during the Joe Biden presidency—fears of a volley of big interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, spurred by Friday’s high inflation number, took the blame.
At 5:30 a.m. ET, the S&P 500 was up 0.5%, but down from bigger highs earlier in the morning. At the same point, Bitcoin was trading around $22,300. The king of crypto has rebounded from overnight lows that saw it sink below $21,000, a level it last touched in December 2020.
Still, the combined market cap for crypto—including Bitcoin and Ethereum’s Ether—has fallen by roughly two-thirds since a period in mid-November when all things crypto were booming at all-time highs.
Tech stocks didn’t fare much better to start the week. The Nasdaq is now down nearly 33% since its November all-time high. And, big-cap tech stocks such as Apple, Google’s Alphabet, and Meta (née Facebook) are really taking it on the chin this year. The much-watched FANG+ index, which packages in the biggest name in tech stocks, is down a whopping 41% since its November all-time high, according to data compiled by Deutsche Bank.
Pushing up tech stocks this morning is the bellwether Oracle, which reported a big quarterly beat after the bell on Monday. Oracle was trading up by nearly 13% pre-market. And Twitter too was nudging higher after news from Reuters broke that Elon Musk will convene a Q&A session with employees, a sign he's committed to his takeover of the social media platform.
How low will it go?
This morning's pause in the rout is hardly calming investor nerves. Morgan Stanley chief investment officer Mike Wilson issued a fresh call for the S&P 500 to test a new bottom at 3,400, a further 10% drop.
Wilson, one of the more bearish voices on Wall Street, did offer some guidance for how to trade the bear market. "With growth now the main risk to stocks, our focus remains on names that can deliver on earnings in a very difficult environment for many companies to navigate. In short, it is still the year of the stock picker as the index remains challenged. We continue to like classic late-cycle winners—defensives and energy—and companies with high operational efficiency," he wrote.
That's not an ideal strategy for the army of passive investors who've sunk their retirement money into broad index funds over the years.
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