Equity market tone improves in March 2026 after the February selloff.

What counted as right

Status

resolved

Settled on

2026-03-31

The S&P 500's price return for March 2026, measured from the 2026-02-27 close (the final trading day of February 2026) to the 2026-03-31 close, is positive.

Resolved against the exact written criterion: Feb-27-close to Mar-31-close price return was -5.09%, i.e. negative, not positive. Sourcing note for transparency: the exact daily closes were retrieved as CBOE daily bars for the S&P 500 index via an Interactive Brokers market-data feed (contract_id 416904); several free public historical endpoints (stooq, FRED, WSJ) were unreachable from this environment. A WebFetch extraction of the Yahoo chart JSON returned 7,489.72 / 7,462.13, but those are the 2026-07-31 close and open respectively - an extraction artifact from the tail of a 1-year series, NOT conflicting data. The CBOE series is date-aligned and internally consistent, and its late-July level matches Yahoo's current ^GSPC level, cross-validating the series identity. Contemporaneous coverage corroborates a sharply negative March 2026 (Bloomberg, 2026-03-31, 'Wild Charts Show Pain Points in S&P 500's Worst Month Since 2022'; Investopedia, 2026-03-31, 'The Stock Market Just Had Its Worst Quarter in Years'); those two were located via news-aggregator listings and not fetched directly, so they are recorded as corroboration only and not cited as evidence URLs.

Sources

• Macro Minute: As we enter final week of Feb, it still feels like a bear market, but we expect March recovery in equities

  Fundstrat Direct · 2026-02-24

  Source

• Macro Minute: $NVDA Fiscal 4Q results strong... rotation back into MAG7, which we expect to be confirmed soon

  Fundstrat Direct · 2026-02-25

  Source

• Tom Lee: March Rally Ahead?

  Fundstrat (YouTube) · 2026-02-26

  Source

• Will March Be a Turnaround Month? Tom Lee Weighs In

  Fundstrat (YouTube) · 2026-02-27

  Source