So Facebook’s foul-up looks worse than everyone thought. On the other hand, all those trade-war fears seem overblown.
Meanwhile, we’re reportedly putting unarmed National Guard troops at the southern border.
All this drumbeat of trade war is distracting investors, says JonesTrading’s Michael O’Rourke. If investors want to know what’s really happening, they should take a long, cool look at the S&P 500 chart, he suggests — and that’s our chart of the day.
The spin from pundits is that trade tensions are fading, and investors are optimistic about a negotiated solution, the chief market strategist writes in a note.
“The reality is the equity market has spent the last four weeks correcting, and the 200-day moving average, along with the 2,600 level of the February lows, were the likely technical support levels.”
In other words, the selling has stopped around where you’d expect — even as experts trot out other reasons why markets seem to be stabilizing.
“In the short term, the selling has been absorbed and has abated,” O’Rourke adds. But he also warns that he isn’t seeing “the high conviction buying that is necessary to form market bottoms.”
Read more: How a “trade skirmish” could become a global trade war
Markets are efficient enough to make commentary look dumb in the morning and dumber in the afternoon.
— Michael Batnick (@michaelbatnick) April 4, 2018
Key market gauges
Futures for the Dow YMM8, +0.38% , S&P 500 ESM8, +0.53% and Nasdaq-100 NQM8, +0.84% are higher. That’s after the Dow DJIA, +0.96% , S&P SPX, +1.16% and Nasdaq Composite COMP, +1.45% closed with gains yesterday, bouncing back from an early selloff that was pinned on trade-war worries.
Europe SXXP, +1.89% and Asia have been seas of green, while gold GCJ8, -0.81% and oil CLK8, -0.21% are losing ground. The dollar index DXY, +0.29% is gaining, and bitcoin BTCUSD, -2.94% is staying under $7,000.
See the Market Snapshot column for the latest action.
The call
President Trump may have the last laugh in the trade skirmishes, suggests our call of the day from a Dutch expert.
Other countries “depend much more on American demand for their products than the other way around,” writes ING’s Raoul Leering in a blog post. “It is likely that China will, in the end, cut its losses and be willing to give Trump something.”
“The American president is playing a dangerous game, but a potentially rewarding one for the U.S.” adds Leering, who is head of international trade analysis for the Amsterdam-based financial giant.
“If Trump succeeds in getting more favorable terms of trade from his trading partners ... he will emerge as the winner in the noisiest trade quarrel the world has seen in the last couple of decades. This would get him in the voters’ good books in the run-up to the midterm elections in the U.S. in November.”
Read more: Trump adopts high-risk strategy in fight with China over unfair trade
The quote
“It very well could be less, but we wanted to put out the maximum that we felt it could be as soon as we had that analysis.” — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social-media giant’s disclosure that data from as many as 87 million of its users may have been improperly shared.
That’s up from the 50 million previously reported. But Facebook’s stock FB, -0.65% is rising in premarket action, as traders seem cheered by his Q&A with reporters yesterday.
See: Most of Facebook’s 2 billion users had their data scraped — will they leave?
And read: 5 things to know about Europe’s new data rules — which could cost big, bad tech billions
The buzz
Analysts continue to think that Tesla TSLA, +7.26% will need to raise more money this year.
Another day, another data breach — Sears SHLD, +7.43% and Delta DAL, +0.26% have been hit.
The deployment of National Guard troops to the border with Mexico is partly an effort to paint Democrats as “the party of open borders.”
Amazon AMZN, +1.33% bulls want Trump to diss the e-commerce giant even more on Twitter so they can buy the dip.
GNC GNC, +2.57% is expanding into Australia, and Sonoma Pharma SNOA, +0.28% has scored an FDA OK for a skin gel.
Roundup seller Monsanto MON, -0.21% posted weaker-than-expected earnings before the bell, and readings on the trade deficit and jobless claims also have hit.
Check out: MarketWatch’s Economic Calendar
On the Federal Reserve front, the Atlanta Fed’s Raphael Bostic is due to talk this afternoon in Florida about financial literacy.
Random reads
Weird Al created a crossword puzzle, and its theme is cheese.
Experts boycott a university, fearing its new lab may develop “killer robots.”
Bollywood star gets 5 years in prison for poaching antelopes 20 years ago.
Lula, Brazil’s ex-president, loses his fight to delay his jail sentence.
3,000 Googlers say the company “should not be in the business of war.”
“Despacito” is the first YouTube video with 5 billion views.
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