Another brutal sell-off wiped out Wall Street again on Wednesday.
The Dow closed down more than 1,300 points lower for the day, putting total monthly losses at more than 5,000 points
Four experts weigh in on another wild day for the markets.
Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money," said any rebound needs to happen across the board or in more constructive corners of the market:
"The market is trying to figure out how to deal with these uncertain times when you've got both financial health on the line and, of course, what we were just talking about with separation -- actual health -- and I think it's not processing it very well, in part because the liquidity is not there but also because we're in a highly emotional moment. I mean [Tuesday], it looked like the market was up but the indices lie and what was really up were things like Hormel. … The wrong stocks are going up. … Otherwise we have to do some triage not unlike what I think they have to do in the health-care system and you always hate to even use that word because what it reminds us is that some have to live and some have to die. But you know what, I want to be constructive, because that's what's necessary for the country. But I also want to be realistic."
David Lebovitz, global market strategist at JPMorgan, said it all comes back to earnings:
"When we think about putting a level on the end of the year, I think it's a guessing game and it's anybody's best guess at this juncture. One of the things that we've been most focused on in trying to figure out where the low may be and where the ever elusive fair value may lie is thinking about what's the right multiple to put on equities and then importantly, what's the right earnings number and I think that's something very different from, say, December 2018 when earnings estimates didn't really move around all that much. You're finally beginning to see earnings come under pressure here, and there are questions around how low earnings estimates for this year will go."
Win Murray, portfolio manager at Oakmark, said the sell-off may be overdone in the long run:
"We are bottom-up value investors. We're trying to think about companies, what they're going to be worth over the lifetime of their existence. We think that the current stock price declines are well in excess of the actual economic loss that's likely to be experienced by these companies looking out over the next five to 10 years. If you think about how much cash flow these companies produce in a given year, it's maybe 5% to 6% of their market cap. And if you think about if it was your private business, if you owned it as a family, and you lost a year's worth of cash flow, you'd say OK, you know the value of this business is down 5% or 6%. If you think that that's somewhat permanently impaired, you can say OK the value may be down 10% or 15%. But, assuming that your business can survive until the next upturn, and we think this will be a fairly sharp but relatively brief downturn, then you'd say, "OK, well, my business is not worth half of what it was trading at three months ago." But that's where the stock prices are currently, what they're currently pricing in."
Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital, called for an immediate shutdown to limit how long the crisis impacts businesses:
"I'm a major shareholder but what I'm saying is if we allow this to continue the way we allow it to continue, every hotel company in the world is done because no business can survive a period of 18 months without revenue. And that's what happens if you operate the way we're operating now. So that's a very, very bearish thought, OK, and I've been super bearish. But I got bullish. And the reason why I got bullish and I've been aggressively buying stocks including Hilton [Wednesday] -- and I've been buying all the way down, Hilton, Restaurant Brands, Starbucks. ... But the reason why is the only answer for the world is to shut the world for 30 days."
