The Financial Times reported that a Chinese trial for Gilead Sciences’s (GILD) antiviral drug remdesivir against Covid-19 ended without meaningful conclusions on its efficacy.
That was enough to reverse the gains in the Standard & Poor’s 500 on the day. The index had been up 1.28% as of 12:30 p.m. New York time. It ended the day with a slight loss of 0.05%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had been ahead 1.44%, finished up 0.17%. The NASDAQ Composite ahead 1.37% earlier, closed with a very slim 0.01% gain.
Shares of Gilead Sciences closed down 4.34% on the day.
The Financial Times story cited documents from the World Health Organization that had been accidentally released. Those documents characterized the trial as a “flop.” Gilead has disputed that characterization of the results.
That this story on a potential Covid-19 treatment was enough to reverse modest market gains–if it was indeed the cause of the change in direction–is an indicator of how tentative the morning’s gains were. They seem to have been based on a stabilization in the oil markets–in other words the world wasn’t about to end–rather than any specific improvement in the oil supply/demand imbalance or the emergence of more empty oil tankers that could be used for storage from their hiding place in the Bermuda Triangle.
And then, of course, we had another puzzling reaction to the news that another 4.4 million Americans had filed for unemployment in the most recent week. Not good news, I’d say.
However, the market is determined to look past current bad news–but it is casting about for something, anything, on which it can hang its optimism about a near-term future without the coronavirus.
