US Stock Futures Slide On Lingering Worries Of A Second Wave Pandemic

Stock futures tumbled on Sunday in overnight sessions, pointing toward more future losses as investors engage with indications of a second wave of coronavirus cases in the midst of restarting the US economy.

Futures dropped about 350 points on Dow Jones Industrial, while futures of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 also dropped 1.4 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively.

Last week's overnight activity on futures markets followed a major pullback caused by growing jitters of a revival of the virus as well as profit-taking by investors after the huge turnaround.

Wall Street seemed increasingly isolated from the rest of the world for weeks - big market gains seemed incongruous with fairly large numbers of unemployed and other statistics suggesting that the real economy is struggling.

But markets caught up with reality last week. All three indexes reported their biggest sell offs since March on Thursday. The indexes recovered somewhat on Friday, but not enough to restore last week's losses.

Market participants continued to look throughout the country for coronavirus cases for signs of resurgence. According to Bloomberg reports, new cases in the heavily populated state of Florida rose faster than the average of last week as of Sunday's count, and the Washington State Department of Health released a report warning of statewide virus increases.

In New York, at the peak of the outbreak in early April, the daily death toll for coronavirus came in at 23 as of Sunday, or the lowest since the pandemic began and well below the nearly 800 per day.

However, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo flagged that there had been over 25,000 complaints about violations of social distancing standards, and warned that he would tighten restrictions if businesses and individuals failed to comply with the phased reopening process.

Still, some analysts maintained that, given their more protracted original lockdowns, geographies that were slower to reopen, including the Northeast, were less at risk of a renewed flare-up in the cases.

Reopening states including Alabama, Florida, North Carolina and California, report a rise in new cases of coronavirus on a daily basis. On Saturday, Texas and North Carolina recorded a record number of hospitalizations linked to the viruses.

A second wave could disrupt the intense economic optimism that had catapulted US stocks to record-highs. Meanwhile in Asia, stocks plummeted to start the week lower.

Meanwhile, Japan's Nikkei fell 0.5 percent in Monday's morning trade. Kospi in South Korea lost 0.4 percent. The Hang Seng Index from Hong Kong and the Shanghai Composite from China dropped 0.6 percent and 0.1 percent respectively.