Stocks broke a pattern last Wednesday, March 25, managing two successive days of gains, something not seen since February 28th. That’s not a long time but it might feel that way to investors who have experienced this downdraft.

Nevertheless, this trading action 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: "The bulk of the downside is behind us...but we might trade sideways for a while….Markets bottom on bad news, not good."

Investors realize that freakishly bad economic data is coming. On Thursday, jobless claims surged to 3.3 million for the week ended March 21, a record and far above consensus expectations for 1.64 million and the previous record, 695,000 in Oct.,1982. 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. That hasn’t happened—yet—as stocks rose Thursday. The next important test with be the 1Q20 earnings season, which begins about first week of April. The fact is, that the S&P 500 index EPS wil...

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