Friday, the 13th: Indicates an ominous start!

It’s Friday, the thirteenth and we all know that’s supposedly bad luck! With the deadly Coronavirus currently sweeping the globe, the sinister date’s already reflecting a major drop in the markets. Asian Peers are reeling under an intense selling pressure and SGX Nifty is trading down more than five per cent, below 9,000-mark.

Stocks sank again on Friday with Japan’s Nikkei 225 tumbling almost eight per cent followed by Hong Kong’s Hang Seng which lost 4.95 per cent and China’s Shanghai Composite losing 2.51 per cent.

Back home, it was a terrible Thursday for the markets as the latter tanked more than eight per cent and posted its biggest one day fall in absolute terms after WHO declared COVID-19 as ‘pandemic’. The volatility index surged 30 per cent to hit multi year’s high of 42.32 levels. The broader market indices Nifty Mid-cap and Small-cap dropped 8.08 and 9.55 per cent, respectively. On the sectoral front, the pain was felt all over, with all indices losing plunging anywhere between 7-13 per cent.  

Here is what happened overnight! US stocks recorded worse daily percentage loss since 1987 while, Dow posted its largest one-day point loss in history as it plunged 2,353 points to close at 21,201, S&P 500 index fell 9.5 per cent to 2,481 and Nasdaq tumbled 9.4 per cent to end at 7,202. Federal Reserve is not leaving any stone unturned to rescue the plunging stock market as it announced it would pump in trillions of dollars of liquidity into financial markets with an unprecedented series of asset purchase. Meanwhile, European markets had its worst single-day losses in history amid travel ban and European Central Bank (ECB) surprised markets by not cutting rates.