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Markets bottom on "bad news" and jobless claims + EPS season is test. Plus evidence "social distancing" working in NYC

Stocks broke a pattern on Wednesday, managing to post 2 successive days of gains, something not seen since February 28th.  And generally reinforces our belief that the "structural bottom" for stocks was registered last week (ala Oct 2008) and affirmed by Tom DeMark's comments to our clients on Tuesday that "bulk of the downside is behind us...but we might trade sideways for awhile""markets bottom on bad news, not good."   We realize freakishly bad economic data is coming.  On Thursday, some economists are projecting weekly jobless claims to surge to as high as 5 million. Many of our more active and tactical clients are short into this, arguing that such wildly bad news cannot be discounted and thus, this "tape bomb" should lead to a big sell-off.#1. So the first test will be jobless claims on Thursday.#2. The next will be the earnings season which starts at the end of next week.  The fact is, S&P 500 EPS will be distorted by "depression economic conditions"But as shown below, as we move into April, the cadence of incoming news and data will likely turn positive.If such is the case, equity markets should be bottoming soon.  In fact, as we highlighted in our FLASH from Monday evening/Tue AM, the 50% retracement of a decline generally only take 0.5X as long as the declin...

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