While equities rallied, safe-haven or more conservative bets like U.S Treasuries and gold weakened, along with risk hedges like the CBOE Volatility Index, or so-called VIX, which plunged 23.3% Monday.
Moreover, traders were looking forward to the busiest earnings week in at least a decade, with over 190 S&P 500 members, including big industry names like Google (NasdaqGS: GOOGL) and Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT), due to reveal first quarter results.
“Earnings are coming in better than expected and this is for a quarter where estimates were pretty tight. We didn’t see much pullback with estimates in the course of the quarter, so expectations were high and we’re beating them,” Hogan added.
So far, 100 S&P 500 companies have reported earnings and 77% have shown better-than-expected results.
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