The Bad Stuff That the Stock Market Worried About Is Starting to Happen

(Bloomberg) -- All of a sudden, the fundamentals aren’t looking as strong.

First it was Apple Inc.’s $5 billion revenue miss, hints of which lopped 30 percent from its stock over three months. Now it’s a closely watched gauge of U.S. factory activity, which dropped to a two-year low and missed every estimate in a Bloomberg survey.

What’s going on? Over and over in the fourth quarter, as the S&P 500 plunged 19.8 percent to the brink of a bear market, investors heard the same refrain: don’t panic, the economy, and corporate earnings, look strong.

In the last 24 hours, confidence in those assurances has taken a hit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points, or 2.6 percent, Thursday morning, while losses in the Nasdaq 100 spiraled toward 3 percent.

“The market is the wisdom of all investors -- it was discounting this type of news-flow with the sharp and violent sell-off we got in December,” Alec Young, managing director of global markets research at FTSE Russell, said in a phone interview. “When it makes a big move, up or down, it’s telling you positive or negative things about future developments. The extreme move down was telling you we’d get this type of news-flow.”

All the bad news has put an abrupt halt to what had been the equity market’s best five-day run since 2011, a surge in the S&P 500 that reached 7.2 percent at yesterday’s high point. It’s reprising anxiety that left stocks within points of a bear market on Christmas Eve.

While plenty of real-time irritants existed to explain the fourth-quarter tumble -- tariff wars, the Federal Reserve, stretched valuations -- many bulls expressed bewilderment about the velocity of the plunge given estimates for growth. The U.S. economy is forecast to expand by 2.6 percent in 2019 and corporate earnings, while off this year’s torrid pace, are expected by analysts to rise 8.3 percent.

“The market is pricing in recession no matter what -- the market has priced it in,” said Jeff Carbone, managing partner at Cornerstone Wealth. “Now to what extent and when? That history hasn’t been written yet.”

For the first time during Donald Trump’s presidency, both economic statistics and sentiment indicators are missing analysts’ expectations. So-called hard data includes government and private-sector data on consumer spending, jobs, manufacturing and housing, while the soft stats looks to Fed factory surveys and consumer confidence polls.

Anything that suggests cracks in the earnings and macro foundation would go down poorly on Wall Street. That’s what was happening Thursday, as Apple’s outlook clouded profit forecasts at everything from semiconductor suppliers to electronics retailers, and the Institute for Supply Management index miss spurred speculation the economy isn’t doing as well as hoped.

For investors trying to read the tea leaves, two risks exist. One, that the market saw something the professional prognosticators didn’t. And two, that the losses piling up in financial markets become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, denting sentiment and impairing consumer and business confidence.

“It’s psychology of the market, which now is that growth is slowing and it almost feeds on itself,” Laurence Benedict, founder of Opportunistic Trader, said in a phone interview. “Businesses don’t want to spend because we potentially are going into a recession. Overall, the perception leads into reality. ”

--With assistance from Felice Maranz.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sarah Ponczek in New York at sponczek2@bloomberg.net;Vildana Hajric in New York at vhajric1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Chris Nagi

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