New Quarter, New Expectations
Hardly anyone expects stocks to sustain the impressive momentum from the first quarter as a new quarter gets under way today.
This article was originally published by
Hardly anyone expects stocks to sustain the impressive momentum from the first quarter as a new quarter gets under way today. But few expected the market to do as well as it did in the first three months of the year either, when a combination of improving domestic economic data and fading European fears helped improve risk appetites.
Driving the market’s near-term trajectory will be a heavy schedule of economic data in this holiday-shortened week, starting with today’s March Manufacturing ISM survey. The expectation is to get a modest improvement in the ISM reading, even though the regional manufacturing surveys, particularly the Chicago PMI, had shown less resilience.
We also have Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) readings for March available for China and the euro zone. The euro zone PMI reading, released by the financial information company Markit, showed activity levels dropping deeper into contractionary territory.
Internal server error