Oil Jumps, Stocks and Bonds Fall Together

Trend: broken, but only just. The S&P 500Glossary: An index of 500 large US companies, weighted by how much each is worth. When someone says “the market” without naming anything, this is usually what they mean. fell 5.1% in March to 6,529 and is down 4.6% for the year. It first closed below its 200-day average on March 19 and ended the month 1.7% under it, its first month-end below that line since April 2025. At the March 30 low it was 9.1% below its January 27 record, just short of a 10% correctionGlossary: A fall of 10% to 20% from a recent high. A fall of 20% or more is a bear market.. The Nasdaq 100Glossary: An index of the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. It leans hard toward technology, so it moves further than the S&P 500 in both directions. fell 4.9% and emerging markets (EEMGlossary: The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, which holds large and mid-sized companies in developing economies such as Taiwan, China, India, South Korea and Brazil.) 9.3%. One detail cuts the other way: small capsGlossary: A company's share price times its number of shares outstanding: the total value the market puts on the company. and the equal-weight S&P 500Glossary: A fund holding the same 500 companies as the S&P 500, but giving each one the same weight, so the largest handful cannot set the result on their own. fell as much or more, yet still ended above their own 200-day averages thanks to their lead earlier in the year. So the break was at the level of the big cap-weighted indexesGlossary: An index that weights each company by its total market value, so the biggest companies move it the most. The S&P 500 is cap-weighted; its equal-weight version gives every company the same share., while underneath, more than half of individual members slipped below their own long-run averages. The chart below shows the index and the share of its members still above theirs.