The Most Powerful Investing Statistic You'll Ever See

This has been a bit of a rough week for the stock market, to say the least. The combination of Monday and Tuesday saw the iconic Dow Jones Industrial Average lose more than 1,900 points, while the broad-based S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) shed close to 210 points, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dumped around 610 points.

At the heart of this drop is growing concern surrounding COVID-19, the lung-focused coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, within China's Hubei province, but has spread to a number of new countries in recent weeks. With multiple new cases of the illness reported in South Korea, Italy, Iran, and Iraq, there's the real possibility that this novel coronavirus could become a pandemic.

Should this happen, it not only adversely affects the well-being of people around the world, but it can also hurt the productivity of the countries and businesses affected by COVID-19. With a number of core companies beginning to sound the alarm about weaker-than-expected results in the first quarter (e.g., Apple and Mastercard), Wall Street is waking up the reality that the novel coronavirus could be a difference-maker come earnings time and might even lead to a recession.

Source Fool.com