Barron's : Start-up Compass Promised to Revolutionize the Real Estate Business.

Start-up Compass Promised to Revolutionize the Real Estate Business. It Hasn’t Happened.

Last summer, the SoftBank Vision Fund and other venture-capital investors put $370 million into Compass, a real estate firm promising to shake up the residential brokerage industry. The deal valued Compass at $6.4 billion, which at the time made it 10 times more valuable than Realogy Holdings, the public company that owns Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran Group, and Sotheby’s International Realty.

Compass maintained that its technology would make its agents more productive and profitable than traditional brokers . But so far, the company, which was founded in 2012, hasn’t fundamentally disrupted the real estate business, and it continues to play catch-up with industry leader Realogy (ticker: RLGY).

Last year, Compass’ approximately 15,000 agents completed about 112,000 transactions worth $88 billion. The company says that it’s now the largest independent brokerage in the country. But the richly valued Compass remains far behind Realogy, whose 300,000 agents closed 1.4 million transactions worth $505 billion in 2019.

“They are a residential real estate brokerage, just like everybody else,” Susquehanna analyst Jack Micenko says of Compass. “They make their money the same way Realogy does and Re/Max does.” Re/Max Holdings (RMAX) is a franchisor with some 130,000 agents operating under its brand.

Some former Compass employees say that the company’s technology falls short of being a disruptive force in the industry or providing a significant advantage to agents. Former Compass employees and real estate professionals with knowledge of the company’s operations told Barron’s that Compass often struggles to get its own employees to use its technology.

A Compass spokesman declined to answer questions about the company’s tech platform or the productivity of its agents. As a private company, Compass isn’t required to disclose financials, and it declined requests to make financial data available.

COMPASS
15,000 Agents
$88 B 2019 Transactions
$6.4 B 2019 Private Value

REALOGY
300,000 Agents
$505 B 2019 Transactions
$384 M Market Value

Co-founder and CEO Robert Reffkin has said that his goal is for Compass to be a “platform to power all real estate decisions” made by buyers, sellers, and agents. His operation, he says, is unique in the real estate industry because it creates a network effect through technology that focuses on both agents and consumers.

Using the Compass platform, real estate agents and prospective buyers are able to share listings and ideas. The realty company also provides agents with technology tools to help with marketing.

In September 2018—the month in which the company announced a $400 million investment from SoftBank, the Qatar Investment Authority, and others—Compass classified two-thirds of its agents as active users of its technology, according to an internal document reviewed by Barron’s. Compass considered any agent who used its technology for at least one minute, once a month to be an active user, the document makes clear.

The company declined to provide other usage metrics to Barron’s.

Compass’ plan to upend residential real estate using technology comes as WeWork, another highly valued SoftBank realty investment, struggles to fulfill its own technology promise. In trying to go public last year, WeWork told potential investors that it had “the power to elevate how people work, live, and grow.”

The company’s S-1 filing said, “Technology is at the foundation of our global platform.” But the same filing disclosed massive losses. WeWork ultimately pulled its planned initial public offering and needed a rescue plan from SoftBank, which later took a $4.6 billion write-down on its WeWork investment.

Compass could face its own reckoning, especially with Covid-19-related shutdowns putting a crimp on real estate transactions. The company’s current value is likely to be a fraction of its July 2019 fundraising figure, given changing private-market dynamics and the performance of public companies in the residential brokerage arena. WeWork’s struggles have weighed on overall private-company valuations, while Covid-19-related shutdowns are hurting real estate stocks. Shares of Realogy and Re/Max have fallen 62% and 41%, respectively, this year.

Several new entrants have struggled to disrupt the real estate market in a profitable way. Zillow Group (ZG) and Redfin (RDFN), as well as SoftBank-backed Opendoor, have poured a huge amount of resources into remaking real estate . Zillow, which grew as a new way for brokers to advertise their services, has pushed into buying and selling homes outright , a service it calls Zillow Offers. The company has lost money in seven consecutive years on a generally accepted accounting principles basis, and Wall Street analysts expect it to lose $427 million in 2020. And that forecast came before the full impact of Covid-19 was modeled in.

In a statement to Barron’s, Zillow said: “We are operating within the investment framework that we laid out for ourselves as we have scaled our Zillow Offers business, and our core business has generated strong earnings that we have been able to invest in making it easier and more seamless for our customers to move.”

Smaller Redfin also has struggled to turn a profit ; in 2020, analysts expect the company to lose $80 million for a second consecutive year.

The travails of these realty operations show just how resistant the U.S. residential real estate industry is to fundamental change. The core of Compass’ pitch to venture capitalists is straightforward: Real estate agents are expensive, and the whole home-buying process is a hassle. To reshape the industry, Compass says it focuses on making agents better at their jobs. The company claims its technology can help agents sell properties more quickly than the competition. “One of Compass’ competitive advantages is that every employee has a singular focus on agent productivity,” CEO Reffkin told Barron’s in 2018.

The company declined to make Reffkin available for this article.

Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence focused on real estate technology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that Compass has struggled with the productivity enhancements. “I’ve yet to see any evidence to support that Compass’ technology is making its agents more productive than the industry average,” he says. “By whatever measure, Compass is among its peers, whether it’s traditional brokerages or luxury.”

Micenko, who covers Realogy, Redfin, and the home-building sector for Susquehanna, says he was shocked by a demonstration he saw in January of Compass’ customer relationship management, or CRM, technology platform. Despite the hype and the resources poured into the project, Micenko recalls thinking: “You can buy this off the shelf for $2 million a year. Realogy and Re/Max and everybody else has a CRM, too.”

Rather than impressing with technology, Micenko says that Compass recruits agents by offering more attractive splits on commissions. “There’s always a food fight for the best agents,” he says. “The market had been, let’s say, 60% to 70% and then Compass came in and was hiring people for a contract period of two years at 85%, 90%, 95% splits,” he says. “What’s going to happen is you are going to get a lot of agents to come over and sell homes, but you’re not going to make any money on it.”

Compass has been on an acquisition binge in the past few years. Its purchases have included real estate companies Pacific Union in the San Francisco area and Stribling in New York, plus Contactually, a Washington, D.C.–based client relationship management software company. Compass now has more than 15,000 agents and an enviable market share in certain locations, including more than 40% in San Francisco.

But the Covid-19 crisis has halted the expansion plans. At the end of March, Compass laid off 15% of its employees, or about 375 people. In a letter to its staff, Reffkin said he was expecting revenue to fall by 50% over the next six months.

As recently as last September, Reffkin was still talking about a “likely” IPO sometime in the future. Those plans are now in doubt. Existing home sales could be down 40% to 50%, year over year, through the third quarter of 2020, Micenko warns, adding: “This is coming at the worst time of the year for a cyclical business.”

Barron's : European Companies Are Ditching Dividends. Investors Have to Make Do

European Companies Are Ditching Dividends. Investors Have to Make Do With the New Paradigm.

Talk about a reversal of fortune. Companies paying dividends are being frowned upon in Europe after years of being celebrated as the avant-garde of the long, post-financial-crisis recovery.

The coronavirus outbreak has changed rules and perceptions. Dividends are now being canceled , or at least “postponed,” to borrow from the financially correct vocabulary of the day. The question is how long the dividend disappearance will last, and what investors should do about it.

There are many reasons for this. Regulators are asking banks to retain dividends to shore up their capital base. Governments, while they are massively coming to the rescue of the private sector, want to make sure that taxpayer money isn’t used, whether directly or indirectly, to reward shareholders of stressed-out companies—in many cases, distant investment funds in faraway countries.

But the main reason by far is the massive shock that lockdowns across Europe are forcing on the economy. To pay out dividends, companies would need to survive (many won’t) and eke out a profit (many won’t, either).

So, what about the survivors that manage to break even? Banks and nonfinancial companies are caught in the ongoing tornado that sees governments everywhere move in to manage their economies. This big state takeover may be temporary, but in the meantime, private companies, markets, and investors have to make do with the new paradigm.

Governments and regulators first chose to send friendly advice and “recommendations” to banks and others regarding dividends . Then, as a few CEOs and boards pretended to look elsewhere, the calls became more pressing.

The European Central Bank, which has launched a massive quantitative-easing program largely designed to help banks keep financing troubled corporates, also allowed European lenders to use their capital buffers—think of them as rainy-day funds—during the crisis.

The ECB asked those same banks to abstain from their planned disbursement of some 30 billion euro’s worth of dividends this year. Yet for Europe’s largest bank, BNP Paribas (ticker: BNP.France), it took a precise warning by its top banking supervisor, threatening legal measures, to finally comply. A similar warning was issued for United Kingdom banks by the country’s Prudential Regulation Authority. For now, all European banks have bowed to their regulators’ veiled orders and scrapped their dividends.

Elsewhere, governments are making the massive aid they are deploying to the private sector conditional on the retention of dividends. There is a political element there.

When millions of workers are losing their jobs and companies are queuing up at the state’s windows to ask for tax breaks, grants, or cheap loans, it doesn’t hurt for a government to show that its money won’t be used to help “rich” investors get the returns they expected.

In any case, the companies operating in the sectors that have been hardest hit by the crisis wouldn’t be able to pay dividends anyway. This is the situation for Airbus, (AIR.France), the European airplane maker, and Accor (AC.France), the international hotel group.

The scrapping of dividends also makes economic sense. However eager managements may be to keep luring investors in spite of the crisis, no one today has any idea of the direction that the economy will take when the recovery begins, and when this may happen. In this context, being cash-cautious is the safest bet. And governments forcing private companies to scrap dividends may, indeed, in spite of appearances, be acting in the interest of shareholders.

FT : Mind the gap between the markets and the real economy

Mind the gap between the markets and the real economy
‘Don’t fight the Fed’ maxim requires investors to ignore the pain of consumers and firms

The past couple of weeks have revealed the stark divide between sentiment in financial markets and economic conditions on the ground.

Central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, have pulled a series of levers intended to stop the coronavirus-induced economic downturn triggering a wider reckoning for a global financial system awash with debt. The US central bank has even pledged to buy riskier credit, helping to lessen the pain for companies that borrowed excessively during the good times — and their owners, such as private equity firms. 

For Wall Street, such actions suggest the worst is behind us, and stocks have rallied accordingly. BlackRock, the $6.5tn-in-assets fund manager, recently said it would follow central banks in developed markets “by purchasing what they’re purchasing, and assets that rhyme with those”. The fund manager is also advising the Fed as the central bank expands further into markets where BlackRock operates.

Similar refrains have resounded from investment houses over the past couple of weeks, prompting analysts to increase their forecasts for equity indices over the coming year. Fighting central banks is futile, according to the consensus view, and corporate earnings will recover in 2021 after a bruising 2020. 

Meanwhile, the real economy is deteriorating. The number of US claims for unemployment insurance has risen beyond 22m in the past month alone, in effect erasing all the jobs created during the past decade. US retail sales and industrial production both collapsed in March. Stuck-at-home consumers, some facing salary cuts if not losing work altogether, have stopped spending much beyond groceries. That suggests the economic damage has yet to peak.

Many worry that inflation will be the ultimate consequence of aggressive stimulus. But the near-term danger is deflation. The Fed’s survey of regions, called the Beige Book, said the economic outlook “calls for further downward pressure on prices on average”. This reading chimes with the dramatic slide in oil prices, which the largest supply-cuts deal in history has not been able to reverse.

Investors looking well beyond this year may take comfort from the latest IMF forecast of a rebound in growth in 2021 to the tune of 5.8 per cent. But this is based on a few assumptions: that there will be no second or third waves of the virus; that economic activity will resume in the coming months; and that global fiscal and monetary stimulus will lay a foundation for the next business cycle.

But even after a recovery next year, the IMF forecasts a $9tn cumulative loss to global gross domestic product during 2020 and 2021, estimating that leading western economies will end up around 5 per cent smaller. Analysts at BCA Research expect muted inflation pressures for the next few years as central banks “maintain very accommodative monetary policies”. The infusion of such liquidity “should prop stocks significantly higher as multiples rise”, according to BCA.

Investors need to assess, then, whether the divergence between financial markets and the state of the broader economy implies too much faith in support from central banks and governments. The scale of the official response highlights just how vulnerable the financial system has become after a decade of boosting returns by raising leverage. Ultimately, policymakers are unlikely to be able to hold back a wave of defaults and rating downgrades that create further turmoil in credit markets. A period of deflation will exacerbate the problems facing debt-laden companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, as the real value of their borrowings increases while their cash flows come under pressure.

Lena Komileva, chief economist at G+ Economics, said the next phase of disruption “will probably extend the pain of real-economy deleveraging and financial capital repair, after a decade of low productivity, low yields and high leverage”.

For all the cheerleading from Wall Street, the internal signals from markets are not exactly comforting. Financials have notably lagged behind healthcare stocks, reflecting anxiety about the economy. But what really sticks out is the narrow leadership within the benchmark S&P 500 stock index, which favours the tech titans. Strip out ecommerce giant Amazon — which hit a record high this week — from the consumer discretionary sector, and a loss of 14 per cent so far this year becomes a decline of around one-fifth.

Market sentiment often runs well ahead of outcomes. At this juncture, the broad performance of equity and credit suggests that long-term trends in sales and profits for many companies will remain intact. The danger is that the pandemic-induced recession and the pain registering across the real economy has yet to really test a leveraged financial system. Hence the speedy and unprecedented actions from the Fed.

But these alone cannot patch holes in economies. As Ms Komileva puts it: “The optics of cheap Fed leverage fuelling capital market bargain-hunting do not equal real economy profitability or job creation.”

FT : Second homeowners accused of exploiting loophole to claim virus cash

Second homeowners accused of exploiting loophole to claim virus cash
Politicians say properties are being classed as holiday lets to be eligible for grants

Politicians in some of England’s most popular seaside towns are calling on ministers to close a loophole which allows second homeowners to access grants designed to help small businesses weather the coronavirus crisis.

Owners of more than 55,000 holiday properties in England are eligible for a £10,000 payout through the government’s emergency small business grants fund, according to property adviser Altus Group. 

But local councillors estimate thousands of those are second homes which have had their designation flipped by owners from residential to commercial in order to avoid paying property taxes. Now the same homeowners are in line for a payout, they complain. 

In order to qualify for the government coronavirus support grant, properties must have a ratable value — the amount it could be rented for annually — of a maximum of £15,000 and be available to rent for 140 days.

The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “These strict criteria will ensure that government funding is directed to those who genuinely need it.” The government has said it will prosecute anyone caught falsifying their records to gain additional grant money. 

“But there’s a big difference between making it available for rent and actually renting it,” said Steve Gallant, leader of the council in East Suffolk, which includes holiday destinations Southwold and Beccles. “The reason people [say they are available] is that then they don’t have to pay council tax. It takes them on to business rates and, because they are below the [£15,000] threshold, they don’t pay anything.”

Officials say enforcement of the rules is hard because second homeowners are not required to show evidence of lettings in order to claim their property is a commercial venture.

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has sought to close what he calls a “business rates loophole”. In November 2018, when local government minister, he launched a consultation to look into the issue, noting “concerns that the current arrangements . . . do not provide strong enough protections against abuse.”

The consultation has yet to conclude, and homeowners who are abusing the system are still free to claim the government’s coronavirus grants.

“This is a system that needs looking at, and its something we’ve continually asked to be reviewed, regardless of the situation we’re in now,” Mr Gallant said.

Local authorities — which could end up distributing 5 per cent, or £550m, to holiday homeowners from the £11bn fund available to small businesses, according to Altus — face a challenge distinguishing between legitimate holiday lets and those gaming the system.

According to the estimates of one council on the south coast, around a fifth of local properties eligible for the grant are holiday homes in name only. 

The advice from central government is “if they have been accepted as a small business and they put the application in for the £10,000, they get that. There’s nothing more they have to do,” said Mr Gallant.

More than a third of the 55,000 properties eligible for the grant are in the south west of England, where local councillors have long complained that second-home owners are costing them millions of pounds in lost council tax by designating their properties as businesses.

“A lot of those houses are rarely let, and when they are it’s to family and friends for a few weeks,” said Judy Pearce, a councillor for Salcombe and Thurlestone in south Devon.

South Hams, the district in which Salcombe and Thurlestone sits, loses £2.5m in council tax receipts a year as a result of properties being designated as holiday homes, according to Anthony Mangnall, Conservative MP for Totnes.

“Fishermen are offered little support other than from universal credit, but are seeing Londoners with second homes being able to apply for £10,000. It’s a tough pill to swallow,” he said. 

The exemption of those second homes from council tax was a “peculiarity”, given they used the same council services as other properties, said Carol Mould, a councillor in Cornwall. 

“My personal view is that it [small business rates] should be scrapped for second homes. Every dwelling should pay the same council tax,” she said.

According to a number of local councillors, normally-vacant holiday lets have been filling up in recent weeks, as their owners seek refuge from cities during the nationwide lockdown.

In Ms Pearce’s ward, “its caused a lot of tension: people have come down the motorway to self-isolate. There’ve even been threats of vigilante action.”

FT : Odey funds make strong gains through coronavirus sell-off

Odey funds make strong gains through coronavirus sell-off
Hedge fund manager’s bearish stance pays off for investors during pandemic

Two mutual funds run by Crispin Odey’s investment business delivered eye-catching results in March when financial markets plunged as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The £294m Odey Swan fund, a long-short equity strategy overseen by high-profile hedge fund manager Mr Odey, posted a 19.8 per cent return in March, taking its performance over the first quarter to 8.3 per cent.

The £73m Odey Odyssey fund, a macro strategy that bets on broad market trends and is managed by Tim Bond, delivered a 15.8 per cent return last month, raising its first quarter performance to 27.4 per cent, according to data from Kepler Partners, a fund research and distribution company.

Both funds have this year outperformed the Odey European fund, one of Mr Odey’s flagship hedge fund strategies, which was up 6.5 per cent at the end of the first quarter after a 21 per cent gain in March.

The Swan and Odyssey funds were overwhelmingly bearish on equities during the long bull run, and dropped significantly between 2016 and 2018. But they have been boosted by crashing stock markets this year.

Odey Asset Management declined to comment.

Many hedge fund managers offer versions of their headline strategies that conform to European mutual fund rules allowing investors to trade daily instead of requiring them to lock up their cash for an extended period. Known as liquid alternatives, these Ucits funds have enjoyed strong sales over the past decade and developed into a sector with about £220bn in assets at the end of 2019.

The Ucits liquid alts sector delivered an unweighted average loss of 5 per cent in March, taking its decline over the first quarter to 6.6 per cent, according to Kepler’s analysis, which covers about 90 per cent of the European alternative Ucits market.

“The volatility in March wiped out gains that many liquid alts had made earlier in the year,” said Georg Reutter, a partner at Kepler. “Sectors such as merger arbitrage and event driven strategies that historically have been very consistent performers really gapped out in March.”

He added: “Managers that adopted more defensive strategies performed better but there was very wide performance dispersion between funds in each subsector.”

LGT Capital’s Dynamic Protection fund, run by the alternative manager owned by the Princely House of Liechtenstein, delivered a return of 20.7 per cent last month, making it the best performer in March.

The worst performer in March was H2O Asset Management’s Vivace fund, down 63.9 per cent last month. H2O, a subsidiary of French bank Natixis, warned clients last month that its funds face “surprisingly large” losses because of bets on bonds and currencies that had soured. H2O’s Allegro, Global L/S Opportunities and MultiReturns funds lost 44.9 per cent, 35 per cent and 25 per cent respectively last month.

Kepler’s analysis showed that the Madrid-based boutique Quadriga Asset Manager’s Igneo fund, a multi-asset strategy, ranked as the best performer of the year with a return of 42.6 per cent.

FT : Hin Leong Trading set to file for bankruptcy protection

Hin Leong Trading set to file for bankruptcy protection
Group founded by one of Singapore’s richest men will seek to restructure debts of nearly $4bn

Hin Leong Trading, the oil trader founded by one of Singapore’s richest men, is set to file for bankruptcy protection as it seeks to restructure debts of almost $4bn.

The privately owned company told its lenders on Friday it was planning to make an application under section 211(B) of the Singapore Companies Act, according to people with knowledge of the situation. 

If granted by the High Court in Singapore it would give Hin Leong a 30-day moratorium period to hammer out a restructuring agreement with almost two dozen banks. 

But Hin Leong has also told its lenders that it is prepared to explore the option of judicial management, the people said. This would see an independent manager appointed by a court to run the company while it is shielded from legal proceedings.

Hin Leong declined to comment.

The plight of Hin Leong, founded in 1963 by self-made Chinese tycoon Lim Oon Kuin, has sent shockwaves through the commodity trading industry. 

The company is one of the largest suppliers of bunker, or ship fuel, in Asia and an active participant in the market-on-close system, which is used by traders to set oil prices in the region. 

Hin Leong, which has debts of $3.85bn, started talks with its lenders this week about a standstill agreement but they were not able to reach an accord. As a result the company decided to seek protection from its creditors.

HSBC is the bank with the biggest exposure to Hin Leong at $600m, followed by ABN Amro at $300m. Three Singaporean banks — DBS Group, OCBC Bank and United Overseas Bank — have exposure of $680m.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the City states de facto central bank, has been in touch with the banks on their exposures, people familiar with the situation said.

It is not clear what caused Hin Leong’s financing issues but they follow a spectacular collapse in oil prices, the slump in fuel demand caused by coronavirus and banks reducing their exposure to all but the biggest commodity traders.

This follows a series of scandals over the past year, most recently the collapse of Singapore-based Agritrade, which left 20 banks facing losses running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Traders were first alerted to problems at Hin Leong earlier this month when the company cancelled a number of contracts because it had not been able to get banks to issue letters of credit, a short-term financing tool for trading houses that act as a guarantee of payment to a seller. 

Hin Leong, which means “prosperity” in Chinese, was founded in 1963 and has grown into one of the biggest suppliers of marine fuel in Asia. Its turnover was $14bn in 2012, according to the company.

OK Lim, as the company’s founder is better known in Singapore, started the business with a single truck supplying diesel to local fishermen. His net worth was recently put at $1.5bn by Forbes. He was born in Fujian province, China. 

Mr Lim’s business empire also includes Ocean Tankers, which says it has more than 100 ships and is run by his son Evan Lim, and Universal Terminal, an oil storage joint venture with PetroChina. 

Ocean Tankers, which counts Hin Leong as a client, has also filed for bankruptcy protection, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The company declined to comment.

Hin Leong is being advised by accountant PwC and law firm Rajah & Tann.

>>> US Close Dow +2.99% S&P +2.68% Nasdaq +1.38% Russell +4.33%

Closing Stock Market Summary

The S&P 500 advanced 2.7% on Friday amid hopes for a COVID-19 treatment and optimism about reopening the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (+3.0%) and Russell 2000 (+4.3%) outpaced the benchmark index, while the Nasdaq Composite (+1.4%) had a more modest performance. 

A report published by Stat News indicated that most coronavirus patients treated with Gilead Sciences' (GILD 83.99, +7.45, +9.7%) remdesivir showed a rapid recovery in a trial at the University of Chicago Medicine. Note, Gilead did not issue an official statement regarding the trial, which lacked a placebo group for comparison. 

The possibility that there might be an effective COVID-19 treatment, though, added to the positive sentiment in market as it could restore some confidence for consumers when the economy starts to reopen. President Trump said yesterday that some states already satisfied the administration's new guidelines to reopen before May. 

While some investors remained cautious, the market continued to price in a better-than-feared economic outlook. All 11 S&P 500 sectors posted gains to end the week with relative strength found in the energy (+10.4%) and financials (+5.6%) sectors. 

The information technology sector (+1.4%) underperformed today amid relative weakness in Apple (AAPL 282.80, -3.89, -1.4%), which was downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Goldman Sachs on a view that iPhone sales will take more time to recover than expected.

Boeing (BA 154.00, +19.76, +14.7%) shares rose nearly 15% after the company said it plans to restart production at its Puget Sound facility next week. Procter & Gamble (PG 124.69, +3.19, +2.6%) advanced with broader market after it beat earnings estimates. 

U.S. Treasuries were holding steady despite the stock market gains amid a weak Q1 GDP print out of China and continued weakness in oil prices ($18.20/bbl, -1.67, -8.4%). Longer-dated maturities saw modest selling, though, after the New York Fed stated it will reduce its Treasury purchases next week to ~$75 billion from ~$150 billion this week.

The 2-yr yield increased one basis point to 0.20%, and the 10-yr yield increased four basis points to 0.65%. The U.S. Dollar Index declined 0.2% to 99.78. 

Friday's economic data was limited to the Conference Board's Leading Economic Index for March, which declined 6.7% (consensus -7.1%) following a revised 0.2% decline in February (from +0.1%). Investors will not receive any economic data on Monday.

  • Nasdaq Composite -3.6% YTD
  • S&P 500 -11.0% YTD
  • Dow Jones Industrial Average -15.1% YTD
  • Russell 2000 -26.3% YTD