Market Recap: Monday, March 30

Stocks rebound on Monday following the market selloff on Friday as investors gain optimism on hindering the coronavirus spread. Yahoo Finance's Live panel takes a closer look at how markets close.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Let's take a look at where we settled on this Monday, fourth out of the last five trading sessions that we have seen, the market's finished higher. Looking at the gains across the board here, the NASDAQ leading the way, up some 3.6% or so. We'll see exactly where we settle out in the next minute or so. The S&P 500 up about 3.3% percent. The Dow the relative laggard but up nearly 700 points during today's trading session.

Just getting wording from Jared Blikre that when you look at the Dow, the S&P, and the NASDAQ, they had their smallest trading range for a single day in a month. And so as we try to get our heads around a little bit of a handle on this market, you know, we don't have to worry about whether we saw the bottom. But is this market just calming down a little bit?

The answer, at least based on today's action, seems to be yes. We'll see exactly where the VIX settles out. But continued selling volatility in this market, VIX below 58. We'll see, again, what the final settlement is in the next couple of minutes. Want to bring in my co-host Jen Rogers now for a little bit more.

Jen, what stood out to you during today's market action? Certainly, a continued mess in the oil space. But I think the market has kind put that to the side and started to move on with is this something more constructive?

JEN ROGERS: Right. People are trying to compartmentalize what's happening in oil. I'm not sure how wise it is on the long-term. But short-term, we have so many areas to triage that we're able to say, all right, energy complex, we're going to figure this out at a later date because it's not going away.

I do want to know, as you said, we're seeing where the VIX is settling, looking like below 58 here. That is still an elevated level but way down from the mid 80s that we were seeing. Health care today, that is a sector that is leading us. And we heard from Anjalee Khemlani about some of the new timeline treatments. The ideas coming out of that sector seem to be exciting people about us getting our hands around the COVID-19 coronavirus. So I think we have some, you know, optimism in health care that's exhibited there today.

And then also just tech. I mean, look. This is-- people want companies that they think are either going to be gaining market share or definitely going to be around later or have good balance sheets. And, you know, that's why Microsoft is up 7% today.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. And let's bring in the other Editor in Chief Andy Serwer for a little bit more kind of on this market, Andy. And I think the-- just the questions around where do we go from here in the context of we now have a little bit more understanding of what the coronavirus is likely to do here in the US in terms of case counts. And I think the market wants to have a positive spin on some of the data. It only wants to have a positive spin on the decrease in the doubling rate here in New York City. But I think if you look outside of those two hotspots, we're still at the very, very beginning of this outbreak at least nationwide here in the US.

ANDY SERWER: And you get this feeling, Myles, that this is life during wartime. And now, the situation is being sort of normalized, in a sense, from Wall Street. And, you know, I still think that, you know, the fact the Market's gone up this many days in a row is kind of a fool's gold, fool's errand.

But you're also starting to see a lot of companies looking to do the right thing. And maybe Anjalee can talk about this a little bit in terms of the rush to make ventilators and masks or all manner of corporate citizens sort of stepping up, which is nice to see. And it's everything from, you know, Richard Branson and, of course, to 3M to GE workers wanting to do this.

But I want to go back to oil for just one second 'cause I know Jen wanted to just cast this to the side, and I don't blame her. But it's just truly-- there's a truly amazing factoid that I just want to highlight. And that is that you can get a barrel of oil in Canada for cheaper than a beer. Now, that's right.

Now, Jared probably knows about West Canada Select, right, Western Canada Select oil which is, like, crappy oil, if you'll pardon the expression. It's like goo. It's like maple syrup. And it always goes for a big discount over WTI, like 8 to 15 bucks cheaper. But right now, a barrel a Western Canada Select oil is $4.18, and you get a beer in Canada for $5. So that is some serious, crazy dislocation stuff.

MYLES UDLAND: And the advantage of the beer, of course, is you can easily store it, unlike the barrel of oil, which, of course, you know, Andy, as you know, that's kind of the crux of what Goldman's worried about today is that storing this stuff, it takes physical space. It takes a lot of money. And at $20 a barrel, there are a lot of problems for a lot of people sitting on a lot of oil right now, especially since no one is driving, flying, really doing much of anything.