Anti-viral drug and oil hold the key to market's recovery

US stocks fell slightly last week giving back some of the largest two-week gains since the 1930s, after an oil crash threatened to complicate efforts to get the global economy back on an even keel in the wake of the novel coronavirus lockdown.

This week, the improbable bull market could march on, as long as there are no nasty surprises from the Covid-19 drug development, the Federal Reserve or the oil markets.

For individual biotech companies, clinical-trial data is often a make-or-break factor. But the trial of Gilead Sciences' remdesivir on patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms may be the first on which the fate of the entire stock market has hung. In the last two weeks, the broad market has been swayed twice by leaked data from remdesivir trials. The first, from a University of Chicago test site, was positive, giving the market a boost. Last week's information suggested the drug had not performed well in a test in China.