How is the stock market going up with 16.8 people filing for unemployment?

a big institutional investor in hedge funds, mutual funds, and insurance companies zeroes in on a stock that it owns and begins selling it off.

As the large investor dumps the stock onto the market, the price will naturally begin to take a nosedive. Other investors might start to panic, and then begin to unload the stock as well. As a result, the stock's popularity, and of course price, continues to fall.

At some point, the institutional investor decides that it's time to jump back into the market and it begins an aggressive buying program to acquire new shares of a given stock. Soon other investors notice that the stock's price has begun to rise again, and they also begin to buy up the stock so they can ride the price up and make a profit. This demand continues to push the price up higher. The cycle might begin again when the price hits a sufficiently high price, and it often does.

Two things are play.

The Federal Reserve Board is injecting trillions of dollars on an almost daily basis into the market to keep them from collapsing. The Fed has been propping up the markets for several year and now its on steriods. They are also buying stocks to help keep the music going. The last three year bull run was artificially high as a resultof the Fed pumping money into the markets.

Two. If you look at the volume,this is among the weakest runs in the market Meaning that hedge fund Managers are not buying. They are waiting for the false enthusiasm of the public to push prices up in what's called a 'dead cat bounse' so they can sell.

If you look at every recession since 1929 there is an intitial drop, a short rise of hope, followed by a long 12 to 18 month drop, it will take ten years before the amrket is back where it was.

BTW i left the market at the beginning of February, a week before the high and a couple weeks before the collapse.

Its a discounting mechanism.  Recession does not mean stocks have to go down.

The market has determined that it was not as god awful as it thought on March 23rd. (That was my personal low this year)

Ive lost a lot of money but my IRA is still worth $385k. I put in $2000 a year for 12 years and $600 the first year,  So stocks have been very good to me over the last 33 years.

Only this time, its damaged so many businesses that its unlike anything I have ever dealt with before. So valuing them becomes much harder.

Stock markets look ahead, investors see better times coming.

Stocks are down - it's the best time to buy. But the stocks are likely to fall more. We haven't got a grip on this nasty thing yet.