Stocks change their mind again, falling sharply this morning in early trading

Have you ever seen a dead cat bounce?

It’s a term that Wall Street traders coined to describe the moment when collapsing markets briefly rise before resuming a downward trajectory.

It looks like investors new to the notion of an economic downturn may have seen their first such bounce yesterday. The glacial domestic response to the spreading novel coronavirus in the U.S. and Europe, coupled with economic pressures on the domestic oil industry coming from Saudi Arabia and Russia, are fueling increasingly negative outlooks among global investors.

Regular readers of TechCrunch’s Market-Mandated Stocks Coverage will note that we’ve been covering the public market’s open and close lately, because with the return of volatility the markets have become active and therefore more influential in day-to-day news. When stocks only went up, it was boring. Now, they do all sorts of crazy things, like kicking off the day like this:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: -712.4, -2.85%
• S&P 500: -76.4, -2.65%
• Nasdaq Composite: -208.1, -2.49%

Cryptos are off a few points in the last 24 hours (small potatoes for bitcoin and friends), while SaaS and cloud stocks are off 2.5%, similar to their broader category.

Sentiment may be shifting from This too shall pass to You shall not pass. Goldman Sachs, an influential investment bank with a growing consumer arm and digital dreams, said today that “the bull market will end soon with stocks dropping another 15% from here,” according to CNBC. That’s bad.

So what?

Are you a little tired of the daily ups and downs in the stock market, and instead want to know how things are in aggregate. Me too. Here’s the stock market’s gains and losses since recent all-time highs, and where they were a year ago:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: -17.8% from recent highs, -2.47% last twelve months (CNBC data)
• S&P 500: -17.3% from recent highs, +3.35% last twelve months (CNBC data)
• Nasdaq Composite: -17.0%, +10.4% last twelve months (CNBC data)

You may now consider yourself informed and up to date on the stocks that are already trading.

Turning to stocks that want to start trading, there’s not much to report. A few SPACs are drawing attention in the Valley, but there are no scheduled, venture-backed IPOs on the horizon. Sure, Procore and Accolade have filed, but they are hardly trying to get out while no one knows what anything is worth.