Finance

Why the Dow is in such a historic funk and how concerned you should be

Published

4 months ago

December 17, 2024

Business Finance News

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 10, 2024.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been declining for nine straight days, heading for its longest losing streak since February 1978. What is going on and how concerned should investors be?

First off, let’s explain which stocks are driving the losses.

The biggest laggard in the 30-stock Dow during this losing streak has been UnitedHealth, which has contributed to more than half of the decline in the price-weighted average over the past eight sessions. The insurer has plunged 20% this month alone amid a broad sell-off in pharmacy benefit managers after President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to “knock out” drug-industry middlemen. UnitedHealth is also going through a tumultuous period with the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of its insurance unit.

And then there’s a rotation going on with investors selling out of the cyclical names in the Dow that initially popped on Trump’s reelection. Sherwin-Williams, Caterpillar and Goldman Sachs, all stocks that typically gain when the economy is revving up, are each down at least 5% in December, dragging down the Dow significantly. These names all had a big November as they were seen as beneficiaries of Trump’s deregulatory and pro-economy policies.

The Dow, largely comprised of blue-chip consumer discretionary and industrial names, is widely viewed as a proxy for overall economic conditions. The extended sell-off did coincide with renewed concerns about a weaker economy in light of a small jump in jobless claims data last week. However, investors still remain quite optimistic about the economy for 2025 and see nothing on the horizon like the stagflationary period of the late 1970s.

Most investors are shrugging it off

There are many reasons to believe the Dow’s historic losing streak is not a source for major concern and just a quirk of the price-weighted metric that’s more than a century old.

First and foremost, the Dow anomaly comes at a time when the broader market is still thriving. The S&P 500 hit a new high on Dec. 6 and sits less than 1% from that level. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite just reached a record on Monday.

Meanwhile, while the length of Dow’s sell-off is alarming, the magnitude is not the case. As of Tuesday midday, the average is only down about 1,582 points, or 3.5% from the closing level on Dec. 4, when it first closed above the 45,000 threshold. Technically, a sell-off of 10% or greater would qualify as a “correction” and we are far from that.

The Dow was first created in the 1890s to model a regular investor’s portfolio — a simple average of the prices of all constituents. But it could be an outdated method nowadays given its lack of diversification and concentration in just 30 stocks.

“The DJIA hasn’t reflected its original intent in decades. It is not really a reflection of industrial America,” said Mitchell Goldberg, President of ClientFirst Strategies. “Its losing streak is more of a reflection of how investors are gorging themselves on tech stocks.”

The Dow price-weighted nature means that it’s not capturing the massive gains from megacap stocks as well as the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq. Although Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are in the index and are all up at least by 9% this month, it’s not enough to pull the Dow out of the funk.

Many traders believe the retreat is temporary and this week’s Federal Reserve decision could be a catalyst for a rebound especially given the oversold conditions.

“This pullback will be the pause that refreshes before a reversal higher to close 2024,” said Larry Tentarelli, chief technical strategist and founder of the Blue Chip Daily Trend Report. “We expect buyers to come in this week … Index internals are showing oversold readings.”

— CNBC’s Michelle Fox, Fred Imbert and Alex Harring contributed reporting.

Finance

More Americans buy groceries with buy now, pay later loans

Published

4 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

People shop for produce at a Walmart in Rosemead, California, on April 11, 2025.

Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday.

The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs.

In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

“A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.”

“For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said.

He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

“I do think it’s going to get worse, at least in the short term,” said Schulz. “I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of reason to expect these numbers to get better in the near term.”

The loans, which allow consumers to split up purchases into several smaller payments, are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest. But consumers can see high fees if they pay late, and they can run into problems if they stack up multiple loans. In Lending Tree’s survey, 60% of BNPL users said they’ve had multiple loans at once, with nearly a fourth saying they have held three or more at once.

“It’s just really important for people to be cautious when they use these things, because even though they can be a really good interest-free tool to help you kind of make it from one paycheck to the next, there’s also a lot of risk in mismanaging it,” said Schulz. “So people should tread lightly.”

Lending Tree’s findings come after Billboard revealed that about 60% of general admission Coachella attendees funded their concert tickets with buy now, pay later loans, sparking a debate on the state of the economy and how consumers are using debt to keep up their lifestyles. A recent announcement from DoorDash that it would begin accepting BNPL financing from Klarna for food deliveries led to widespread mockery and jokes that Americans were struggling so much that they were now being forced to finance cheeseburgers and burritos.

Over the last few years, consumers have held up relatively well, even in the face of persistent inflation and high interest rates, because the job market was strong and wage growth had kept up with inflation — at least for some workers.

Earlier this year, however, large companies including Walmart and Delta Airlines began warning that the dynamic had begun to shift and they were seeing cracks in demand, which was leading to worse-than-expected sales forecasts.