Investors are starting to run for the exits. Stocks were primed for another steep sell-off on Friday , with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures plunging more than 900 points. S & P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures were down more than 2.5% each. Those losses come after China said it will impose a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods in retaliation for higher U.S. duties unveiled by President Donald Trump earlier this week. If these declines materialize through Friday’s cash session, they could mark the beginning of a washout some think the market needs before it can make a meaningful comeback from the current correction underway since the February top. As CNBC’s Michael Santoli put it on ” Squawk Box ” earlier Friday: “The market all along has been trying to be pretty rational about this, saying ‘corporate fundamentals are fine, the credit markets are not rebelling right now.’ That’s changed. You have today a little more of a ‘panic-y, get-me-out, I need to just get to safety’ type of response.” The Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) , known to many as Wall Street’s fear gauge, last traded around 37 and hit a high of 45.56, another sign that investors are not taking the tariff escalation in stride. .VIX 5D mountain VIX 5-day chart The major stock averages had their worst day since 2020 on Thursday. The Dow dropped more than 1,600 points, while the S & P 500 and Nasdaq tumbled 4.8% and 6%, respectively. Butdespite the steep drop the VIX wasn’t reflecting panic, hitting a high of just 30.02 on Thursday, according to Cboe’s Mandy Xu. “As big of an increase in the VIX as we saw [Thursday], we would have expected a much bigger increase given the fact that the S & P 500 sold off almost 5%,” the company’s head of derivatives market intelligence told “Fast Money” on Thursday . She noted that the VIX spiked to a high around 65 in August, when a dollar-yen carry trade reversal sent global markets lower. “What really produces the type of volatility shocks we saw last summer, is a true black swan event . That’s not what we saw” in the previous session,” she said.
Panic selling in the stock market starts to pick up
