2nd Best Week Of The Year
Equities start the day higher as the 2nd best week of the year continues. What’s the best week? Halloween, and I bet you didn’t expect THAT did you? I mean I guess Christmas is ok, but it’s so insanely sold out. The spirit of Christmas has long been lost to fancy ties and fake trees so I rank that 3rd. I guess I’m hipster about my holidays, anti-consumerism, gimme a good scare and gravy soaked stuffing and I’ll be a happy camper. It’s been awhile since my last piece…did I miss anything in the market? Let’s see: friendly Fed, Europe struggling, Japan doing all it can, $AAPL higher every day, muddle thru economy (GDP revision was ok this morning), confused stock market bears, and fresh highs for $SPX. In fact, $SPX is up 12 of the past 14 days so if we close lower today that means absolutely nothing (but you can bet bears will claim a massive victory). Anyway, people continue to marvel at the performance of US stocks and that confuses me a bit. What better recipe would you want for stock market performance that what we currently have? We have a Fed in no rush to do anything, earnings that are growing (see Factset for a great breakdown on this), an economy that isn’t too hot or too cold, and a political environment where gridlock reigns. Take em up baby! Plus, we are in the middle of the best seasonal trade there is so stick with it people. This isn’t the time to get cute about Demark wave 18 exhaustion… whatever that even is.
After the open we spent the early moring selling off, then the later moring rallying, then the rest of day trading sideways. In fact, if I had to wager 1 of my hard earned US dollars, I’d say the market goes nowhere for the next 3 sessions. Crazy right? Really going out on a ledge here. Apple remains the topic du jour because its move has been just breathtaking. If I told you that Apple could buy the bottom 26 companies in the S&P500, at a 20% premium to their current stock prices, and would STILL have cash on their balance sheet, would that shock you? Up 25% since Oct 16…c’mon man. Apple is also a huge reason why anyone with the S&P as their benchmark is struggling. Apple is a 4% weight in the index…it would be really hard for a PM to put 4% of their portfolio in one stock, that is up 50% YTD, and not have taken any profits. Tough..tough..so tough. What else…consumer confidence missed, Richmond Fed missed, Case Shiller beat, and only one stock was down more than 4% in the S&P (NBR, of course it was energy, crude oil is a hot mess). Quiet I guess, exactly what you’d expect from a holiday market. By lunch we sat on 2,069, up absolutely nothing. Hey, I had a few Thanksgiving tips on twitter today including an amazing cocktail you should make for the holiday, toss me a follow @bullandbaird!
The afternoon was a no show, a total dead sideways affair, so I spent a good portion of it trying to figure out why I’ve never seen these before. I mean where have you been all my life? We closed unchanged because holiday markets have descended up on us. He Scar, be prepared for sideways (Disney comedy all day). Since that’s the case, let spend tomorrow ranking thanksgiving sides and discussing why treasury yields keep falling. Both of those are extremely important right now and deserve our attention. So there we go, nothing to learn from today that we don’t already know. 2,067 on Nov 25? I bet we close higher by year end.
Final score: Dow -1bps, S&P500 -11bps, Nasdaq +9bps, Rus2k -5bps.
News Highlights:
Its Thanksgiving week, there are no news events (in the market at least), so let’s skip to the big finish.
Tonight we have some sweet, sweet Archery action. Outside of the Olympics, or a video game, when’s the last time you cared about Archery? Never right? Anyway, give this one a shot (that pun though..)
Have a good night.