Stock market selling accelerated on Thursday as Wall Street digested the latest drips of private labor market data.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 506 points, or 1.1%. The S&P 500 was down 1.2%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 1.9%.
The Nasdaq is already down 1.8% so far in November. If the decline holds, it would be the index’s worst start to a month since April, when it fell 9.9% in the first four trading days, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Energy, utilities, and materials were the only major sectors in the S&P 500 on the rise. Consumer discretionary and tech stocks were getting hammered. Airlines were getting hit following a Federal Aviation Authority directive to reduce flight schedules starting Friday due to the shutdown. Qualcomm and Arm Holdings were both down on earnings.
Wall Street was buying bonds. The yield on the 2-year Treasury note fell to 3.57%. The 10-year yield fell to 4.09%. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF rallied 0.8%.
The rally in the bond market followed numbers from Revlio Labs, a workforce intelligence firm. Revlio’s data suggest the U.S. economy lost 9,100 nonfarm jobs in October. That figure included a large drop in the government sector amid the shutdown.
The Revlio jobs numbers looked “ugly,” according to Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at NatAlliance Securities.
“Current releases show massive revisions down,” Brenner writes. “Giving treasuries a bid…October was a negative number.”
While Revlio’s numbers are generally not a major market event, Wall Street has been starved of government labor market data due to the shutdown.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas also said U.S. employers announced 153,074 job cuts in October, which was up 183% from September.
“Bears are saying this is clear evidence of a cooling labor market,” Mizuho’s Daniel O’Regan tells Barron’s. “At the same time, technology stocks like AMD, Oracle, and software names are under pressure, and popular retail and speculative ‘meme’ stocks, including crypto miners and AI power companies, are also struggling.”
O’Regan says retail investors are seeing losses, while bitcoin is also falling back toward the key $100,000 line. He also says he’s heard commodity trading advisors, who follow diversified futures strategies, are “net sellers in most market scenarios over the next few days.”
“Volumes are light across the board so it is hard to confirm whether or not this move is coming from real money/active investors or just retail and quant selling,” he says.
