Well that was a night and a day…
As Goldman’s Chris Hussey summarized today, “the Russia-Ukraine conflict transitioned from a ‘known unknown’ to a ‘known known’ today, in the parlance of Wall Street, and markets may be showing some signs of embracing a bit of the diminishing ‘uncertainty’.”
The most devastating package of sanctions ever in the history of the world, avoided touching any commodity product and did not include SWIFT restrictions and that was all the excuse that was needed for traders to lift hedges, punching stocks higher.
Today’s rebound (from down 4% to up 3.5%) was the biggest intraday jump in NQ futs since 3.13.2020 as The Fed unleashed hell on the bears.
All the US majors got back into the green by the close…
(Today was a bigger swing than on 4/6/2020… the day that SBA unveiled the Paycheck Protection Program.)
The Nasdaq futures was down 22% from its highs overnight – in bear market territory – but no longer.
For context, here is performance from last Friday (before Putin’s address)…
So here are some more fun roundtrips…
Bitcoin went from a selling scramble to total panic-buying…
Source: Bloomberg
Even the Ruble rebounded after crashing to its weakest on record against the dollar…
Source: Bloomberg
And finally, the world was in “Extreme Fear” this morning…
We wonder what state of euphoria or dysphoria it will feel tomorrow.