All U.S. Indexes Drop More Than 3%

Adviser Investments’ Chief Investment Officer Jim Lowell has the market analysis for Tuesday, December 4. All major U.S. stockA financial instrument giving the holder a proportion of the ownership and earnings of a company. indexes dropped more than 3% on Brexit’s Parliamentary defeat and ongoing trade-war concerns: The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and NASDAQ fell 3.1%, 3.2% and 3.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, bondA financial instrument representing an IOU from the borrower to the lender. Bond issuers promise to pay bond holders a given amount of interest for a pre-determined amount of time until the loan is repaid in full (otherwise known as the maturity date). Bonds can have a fixed or floating interest rate. Fixed-rate bonds pay out a pre-determined amount of interest each year, while floating-rate bonds can pay higher or lower interest each year depending on prevailing market interest rates. prices rose sharply, with the yieldYield is a measure of the income on an investment in relation to the price. There are several ways to measure yield. The current yield of a security is the income over the past year (either dividends or coupon payments) divided by the current price. on the 3-year Treasury topping that of the 5-year Treasury by 1.4 basis points, or 0.014%. Despite this yield-curve inversion, Jim emphasized that economic fundamentals—including earnings growth, low interest rates and a well-employed workforce—continue to indicate slow growth, not no growth.