The ‘clouds’ weighing down the market aren’t going anywhere: Chart of the Week

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The stock market swings are intensifying.

In the past week, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) either increased or fell by 1% every day — generally the latter — as uncertainties around the path of economic growth, particularly President Trump’s proposed tariffs, have weighed on investors.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) just had their worst weeks in six months. The S&P 500 is now 6% off its most recent all-time high, while the Nasdaq Composite is now in a correction, off more than 10% from its most recent high.

As our chart of the week shows, the path lower has come with some aggressive bounces, usually prompted by Trump either threatening tariffs — or de-escalating those threats.

In this pressurized environment, even something like a relatively solid February jobs report did little to cool investor nerves on Friday. Stocks still swung big once again, diving into the 5,600s before eking out a modest gain, closing at 5,770. And the market’s new bet for three Federal Reserve interest rate cuts during 2025, as the economy slows, changed little.

“There’s a lot of clouds out there, some storms, things are getting pretty dark,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told Yahoo Finance. “So I think I’d soak this [jobs] number up. I think it might be the best number we get for a while.”

While there’s heavy debate on how long the clouds will be here and how big of a storm they could bring with them, one thing feels clear right now: They aren’t going away in a swift enough fashion for investors to feel confident taking the boat out tomorrow.

On the other hand, the market’s recent skittishness isn’t a common occurrence. Through Thursday, the S&P 500 had swung 2% or more for seven straight sessions as of Friday. Per data from Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre, this is the longest stretch with such large intraday movement in the benchmark index since August 2024.

Notably, that’s also the last time the market narrative centered around a “growth scare,” where investors grew concerned about the trajectory of the US economy.

BlackRock’s chief investment officer of global fixed income Rick Rieder, who’s been in the industry since the 1980s, wrote in a note to clients Friday that “it seems as if there have been very few times in markets where one has to interpret so much disparate, and at times conflicting, data relative to the economy and influences on it.”