On Sunday night, U.S. stock futures dropped sharply. During the first few minutes of trade, options tied to the S&P 500 dropped more than 5%, as it looked like stocks were going to have another bad day.

S&P 500 futures were down 5.3% at 4,863 minutes after they opened for business on Sunday. Futures linked to the Nasdaq-100 were down 5.4% at 16,578 and had lost even more money. At 36,831, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 1,705 points, or 4.3%.

Futures started the day down, but they quickly recovered. At one point, Dow futures were down about 1,000 points and S&P 500 futures were down by 3%. The damage was even worse in Asia. The Nikkei 225 in Tokyo fell 6% and the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong fell 9%.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin started to fall on Sunday afternoon, after staying mostly stable over the weekend and at the end of last week. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin has lost almost 6% of its value. It was worth $78,142 on Sunday night.

One chief investment officer said that the violence on Sunday night was caused by the government not giving enough assurances over the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, President Trump played golf in an event in Florida. The most recent news from the White House press pool said he was on his way back to Washington, D.C.

James Demmert, chief investment officer at Main Street Research, told MarketWatch via email, “Last week’s brutal selling pressure is set to continue on Monday. The market is telling us that investors still don’t understand the effects of tariffs and tariff retaliation, and they are worried that economic growth is likely to slow to a complete halt or recession.

This new round of selling comes after a very rough stretch that hasn’t happened before. The market took a historic two-day drop at the end of last week after Trump shocked investors and world leaders by announcing broad tariffs against U.S. trade partners. Investors are ready for a week where almost anything could happen.

Stocks have crashed over the last two days,” CEO of Arbeter Investments and experienced technical analyst Mark Arbeter said on Sunday afternoon.

On Thursday and Friday, the S&P 500 dropped by a total of 10.53 percent. It is now in a decline phase for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and it has joined the small-cap Russell 2000 in a bear market. Since March 12, 2020, it was the worst two days for all four big indexes.

It is messy to rebuild 80 years of economic, geopolitical, and domestic government order that were built on the foundations of WWII in just 80 days,” wrote Julian Emanuel, head of equity, derivative, and quantitative strategy at Evercore ISI. “Using the “sledgehammer” of a higher tariff than Smoot-Hawley did in the 1930s was sure to cause chaos.”

Emanuel said that Evercore lowered its price goal for the end of 2025 from 6,800 to 5,600 because of the uncertainty.

Long-lasting uncertainty about tariffs and a growing global trade war have made assets more volatile, hurt investor confidence, and increased the chance that a drop in so-called “soft” data, like survey-based data, will “infect” hard economic data and lead to stagflation or a full-on recession, he said.

On the other hand, Trump’s top economic advisers played down fears of a recession on Sunday, saying that dozens of countries are trying to get better terms.

Some buyers felt uneasy about the way things were set up before Black Monday, the stock market crash on October 19, 1987. Researchers at Bespoke Investment Group found that since stocks started trading on a five-day week in 1952, the S&P 500 has only dropped more than 10% in two days three times: October 1987,

Between November 2008 and March 2020.

They saw that the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust has had 20 drops of more than 7% in just two days since it was first introduced. They said that SPY has generally had a big bounce-back day after two days of drops of 7% or more, with an average gap up of 1.4% at the open and a gain of 3.06% from open to close. The full next-day move has been +4.54% on average, and 16 of the 19 times it has been positive.

They found that the 2.52% drop on Oct. 8, 2008, during the worst of the 2007–2009 financial crisis was the biggest drop the next day after a drop of at least 7% in two days.

When these kinds of selloffs happen, the market may be technically much oversold.

Arbeter said, “Bullishly, things look so bad they might be good.” He pointed out that 90% of the stocks in the S&P 500 fell on Friday, which he called “a sign of panic” and a combination of other technical signs.

As of Friday, the S&P 500 closed at 5,074.08 on the chart. Arbeter said that support is at 4,967 and the top of a cup shape drawn out in 2022–2023 is at 4,800. This is a 50% retracement of the rally off the 2022 low and the “rising and very reliable” 200-week moving average.

In a note released Sunday, analysts at Matrix Trade said it was interesting that investors have not seen any signs of worry about the market drop from either the Trump administration or the Federal Reserve.

It’s likely that Trump wanted to stay tough over the weekend in order to try to make deals. But they wrote, he probably won’t last much longer if the market falls again on Monday.

In the next few days, several countries could get rid of their tariffs. This would let Trump claim success and calm the markets. “However, China and the EU are the most important trading partners, and markets are likely to stay tense until deals are made with them,” they wrote. “Right now, it looks like things will get worse instead of better, which supports a continued decline.”