NEW YORK (AP) — It was only five sentences, but it was enough to startle the market.
On Thursday, two Goldman Sachs analysts essentially advised clients to bet that the stock market will keep going down.
In a research note, Noah Weisberger and Aleksandar Timcenko recommended shorting the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, a key measure of the overall stock market. When investors short a stock, they are betting that its price will fall.
The note was released at 10:46 a.m., when the S&P 500 was trading around 1,350, down six points for the day. By late afternoon it fell to 1,330, down 26 points, or 2 percent.
The Goldman analysts cited a report from the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve showing a sharp contraction in manufacturing in the Northeast.
