(New York)

The job losses keep coming week over week. Thursday morning has become a repetitive and gloomy event as millions of job losses hit the tape when weekly jobless claims are released. This morning the figure was 3.3m. That number means the total figure is now over 30m jobs lost in the last six weeks. The fastest drop in history by a gigantic margin. What is even more troubling is that the data underrepresents the true figure, as call centers have been unable to cope with the demand and thus have been underreporting true figures.

FINSUM: The job loss figures are absolutely staggering. California is paying $1bn in jobless insurance per day. We think the market is underestimating how deep of a recession this hit to consumer spending might represent.

COVID Loan Tracker was founded by small business owners to help fellow entrepreneurs understand when their PPP and EIDL loans will be paid. The SBA has provided very poor leadership and information, and the need for real data about when loans are actually being disbursed has never been higher. Please help yourself and fellow small business owners by filling out our survey so we can all understand when we will get our loans.

FILL OUT THE SURVEY TO HELP SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS

The SBA has been very short on details throughout the Paycheck Protection Program. While they have released “approval” numbers, there is no data on how many loans have actually been disbursed. If you are a small business owner, approval means nothing and disbursement means everything—you cannot pay employees with an approval, you need cash. With that min mind, COVID Loan Tracker has launched live stats which track the disbursement rate of PPP loans right on its home page.

You can instantly see what percent of loans have been disbursed, the median processing time, the total volume of loans processed, the median size of loan, the median employees of successful applicants and more. For a deeper dive, view the DATA page, which includes more in-depth charting.

And if you still need to apply for PPP, you can do it here.

(New York)

So who is going to benefit most in the inevitable reopening of the economy? It is a tricky question to sort out. The most obvious companies are already seeing very stretched valuations, so those probably aren’t a good buy. Accordingly, here are some interesting names to look at in a category Goldman Sachs is calling “quality-at-a-reasonable-price”: Texas Instruments, Facebook, Mastercard, Alphabet, Home Depot, Ross Stores, Colgate-Palmolive.

FINSUM: Nice range of names. On the tech side, we love Facebook and Google. They are going to make more and more money as this lockdown accelerates the shift to ecommerce. On the retail side, discount stores like Ross seem like a good bet.

(New York)

One of the most famous hedge fund managers on Wall Street made a bold warning yesterday. Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital, adored by the media, said yesterday that he thinks stocks will retest their previous lows. “People don’t understand the magnitude of... the social unease... that’s going to happen … We’ve lost every single job that we created since the bottom in 2009”.

FINSUM: One thing that seems certain right now is that consumer spending is not going to bounce back to where it was for some time. It is going to take years for all these people to re-enter the workforce and loosen the purse strings. A recession for the rest of the year appears inevitable.

(Chicago)

Small cap prices usually expand and contract more quickly than large caps do. This happens both in downturns and upswings. However, in this coronavirus rally, that has not held up, as small caps are faltering while their larger peers soar. For instance, the Russell 2000 is trailing the Russell 1000 so far this year. “This latest rally is very much a capitalization story — the big players were the ones that held their own”, says SEI investments. Another portfolio manager added “The secular growth force that comes from mega-cap tech stocks doesn’t appear to be replicable in the rest of the market”.

FINSUM: Small caps tend to lack the scale that would allow them to thrive even as the economy falls, which means there haven’t been as many winners as there were in large caps.