All of a sudden, the fundamentals aren’t looking as strong.

• All of a sudden “all at once”的变体；突然

First it was Apple Inc.’s $5 billion revenue, hints of which lopped 30 percent from its stock over three months. Now it’s a closely watched gauge of U.S. factory activity, which dropped to a two-year low and missed every estimate in a Bloomberg survey.

• lop 下滑，下垂
• gauge 标准

What’s going on? Over and over in the fourth quarter, as the S&P 500 plunged 19.8 percent to the brink of a bear market, investors heard the same refrain: don’t panic, the economy, and corporate earnings.

• Over and over 反反复复
• plunge 下跌；暴跌；狂跌
• refrain 经常重复的评价（或抱怨）

In the last 24 hours, confidence in those assurances has taken a hit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points, or 2.6 percent, Thursday morning, while losses in the Nasdaq 100 spiraled toward 3 percent.

• take a hit 遭受打击
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average 道琼斯工业指数
• spiral 螺旋式上升（或下降）

“The market is the wisdom of all investors -- it was discounting this type of news-flow with the sharp and violent sell-off we got in December,” Alec Young, managing director of global markets research at FTSE Russell, said in a phone interview. “When it makes a big move, up or down, it’s telling you positive or negative things about future developments. The extreme move down was telling you we’d get this type of news-flow.”

• sell-off 证券的跌价；止损抛售；股市抛售
• news-flow 新闻流动；新闻波

All the bad news has put an abrupt halt to what had been the equity market’s best five-day run since 2011, a surge in the S&P 500 that reached 7.2 percent at yesterday’s high point. It’s reprising anxiety that left stocks within points of a bear market on Christmas Eve.

While plenty of real-time irritants existed to explain the fourth-quarter tumble -- tariff wars, the Federal Reserve, stretched valuations -- many bulls expressed bewilderment about the velocity of the plunge given estimates for growth. The U.S. economy is forecast to expand by 2.6 percent in 2019 and corporate earnings, while off this year’s torrid pace, are expected by analysts to rise 8.3 percent.

• bewilderment 困惑；迷惘；迷乱
• torrid 艰难的[very difficult]

“The market is pricing in recession no matter what -- the market has priced it in,” said Jeff Carbone, managing partner at Cornerstone Wealth. “Now to what extent and when? That history hasn’t been written yet.”
For the first time during Donald Trump’s presidency, both economic statistics and sentiment indicators are missing analysts’ expectations. So-called hard data includes government and private-sector data on consumer spending, jobs, manufacturing and housing, while the soft stats looks to Fed factory surveys and consumer confidence polls.
Anything that suggests cracks in the earnings and macro foundation would go down poorly on Wall Street. That’s what was happening Thursday, as Apple’s outlook clouded profit forecasts at everything from semiconductor suppliers to electronics retailers, and the Institute for Supply Management index miss spurred speculation the economy isn’t doing as well as hoped.

For investors trying to read the tea leaves, two risks exist. One, that the market saw something the professional prognosticators didn’t. And two, that the losses piling up in financial markets become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, denting sentiment and impairing consumer and business confidence.

• read the tea leaves 预测未来
• prognosticator 预言家

“It’s psychology of the market, which now is that growth is slowing and it almost feeds on itself,” Laurence Benedict, founder of Opportunistic Trader, said in a phone interview. “Businesses don’t want to spend because we potentially are going into a recession. Overall, the perception leads into reality. ”