S&P, Nasdaq post big quarterly percentage drops on Trump tariff turmoil
The two benchmarks also suffered heavily in March, recording their biggest monthly percentage drops since December 2022, as President Donald Trump rolled out a swathe of new tariffs which raised fears of a global trade war that would hurt economic growth and spur inflation.
For the quarter, the S&P 500 slumped 4.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite plummeted 10.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was not immune to the unease, slipping 1.3% in the opening three months.
«Investors, more or less in this first quarter, threw their hands in the air, as you really cannot trade around this,» said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial.
The Magnificent Seven technology names, which drove markets higher over a bull market which stretched through 2023 and 2024, weighed heavily on U.S. equity markets as investors sold off growth names.
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Tesla was down almost 36% in the first quarter, and Nvidia dropped nearly 20%.
«Our big lesson from the first quarter is diversification is not dead,» said Michael Reynolds, vice president of investment strategy at Glenmede.
«Whether you're looking between, or within, asset classes, if you avoided the perils of market concentration, you actually held up quite a bit better versus some of the headline indexes.»
While information technology and consumer discretionary — both sectors with heavy influence from big-tech names — posted double-digit percentage declines for the quarter, a majority of the 11 S&P sectors were higher in the same period, led by energy's