Crazy for Junk

By Alex Eule |  Tuesday, March 30 Where Is Everyone? For the second consecutive day, stocks set a 2021 volume low. Just 10.3 billion shares traded hands today on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. That's less than half of the total from the year's highest volume day on Jan. 27, the peak of the GameStop and meme-stock craze.  Maybe all the Redditors -- and Wall Street traders -- have gone on vacation. It's a four-day week, after all, with stock markets closed on Good Friday.  Today, the S&P 500 fell 0.3%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 104 points, or 0.3%. The Nasdaq Composite was nearly flat, off just 0.1%  Any weakness might have been caused by another move higher for bond yields. The 10-year Treasury note was up for the fourth consecutive day, to 1.72%. Since the year began, the 10-year yield is up 0.81 percentage points. As we've written about many times, the quick rise in rates has pushed investors to rotate out of high-priced growth stocks into value names. With the quarter almost over, we can now see just how significant that rotation has become: My colleagues at Dow Jones' market data team note that the S&P 500 Value index is outperforming the S&P 500 Growth index by its largest margin since the first-quarter of 2001. That was right in the middle of the dot-com bust. While the rotation has led to lots of big moves in individual stocks, the broader picture is actually one of calm. The Cboe Volatility Index, or the VIX, fell 5.5% today, to 19.61, putting it right back near its 52-week low. It's down 64% from its high almost exactly a year ago, at the height of the pandemic fears.

 

DJIA: -0.31% to 33,066.96 S&P 500: -0.32% to 3,958.55 Nasdaq: -0.11% to 13,045.39 The Hot Stock: DXC Technology +9.1% The Biggest Loser: Illumina -6.6% Best Sector: Consumer Discretionary +1.0% Worst Sector: Consumer Staples -1.1%