“It’s fair to say that financial markets have started 2024 with something of a mild hangover,” Jonas Goltermann, Capital Economics’ deputy chief markets economist, said in a Wednesday note. Indeed, as normal life resumes in 2024, the stock market’s early returns are sounding a different tune to their surge in 2023. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is seeing the worst of it, falling more than 1.5% in the first two days of trading this year after soaring nearly 40% in 2023.
Goltermann cautioned against “reading too much into” stocks’ performance in the first couple of days of trading in the new year, but argued that it makes sense to think about “plausible explanations” for the drop and “what they imply for the year ahead.”
