It's been a terrible start to 2016 for the stock market.
On Monday stocks were lower again after last week capped the worst-ever 5-day start to a year for the S&P 500. And so after 2015 saw the market have its worst year since 2011, 2016 hasn't lifted anybody's spirits.
In an afternoon email on Monday, Rich Barry, floor governor at NYSE, pointed us to five macro factors that traders are blaming for the early-year stock market disaster.
- There's not a whole lot of faith that earnings support will be there.
- The Fed is no longer in easing mode, so stimulus support is no longer there.
- The dollar may not be going up, but it's not dropping.
- Oil is stuck in the low-$30s and may be going lower.
- China - enough said.
Now for those market junkies paying attention day in and day out, these are more or less the usual suspects.
And of course major stock market events are never about one specific thing but how a series of seemingly disconnected issues are in fact tightly intertwined.
As Barry writes, "As we look at the 2016 bull argument, for the moment it does not seem too compelling: slightly better global growth while the U.S. keeps improving, but we are still not seeing notably improving global growth. And, that, ultimately, is what is driving the selling, or more accurately, the lack of buying interest in equities that has resulted in the single worst start to a year for stocks in history."