The Week Ahead – If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Try and try again.  

More stimulus, more “exciting” vaccine news, more money being tossed around.  This time it’s M&A news with Oracle buying TikTok and NVidea (NVDA) buying ARM Holdings from Soft Bank (SFTBY) for $40Bn, giving both companies a nice boost.  Oil (/CL) is up again on hurricane news but still pathetic under $37.50 but Natural Gas (/NG) is popping back to $2.40, ending the bear move that took it back to $2.25 from $2.70, which was a 16.66% correction.

It’s Quad Witching Week in the markets, when tock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures expire simultaneously.  So we can expect the unexpected this week – especially with a Fed Meeting on Wednesday along with Powell’s speech at 2:30 that day.  We also have Retail Sales on Wednesdy morning but, other than that, it’s a pretty dull data week and I don’t see what the Fed can do to help so I don’t see this mornng’s exuberance lasting, which means the Dow Futures (/YM) should be a good short at 27,750 when they cross below that line.

It’s amazing to think that it’s now September 15th and we are now beginning our 6th month in captivity since we finally began worrying about Covid on March 15th.  There were about 80,000 cases, mostly in China at the time and now there are 29,030,058 this mornng with 6,520,606 in the US alone and, this week, we will pass 200,000 American deaths from Corona.   29M is 362 TIMES 80,000 and it’s been 180 days so we’ve added 2 China’s per day of victims since March and we are still growing at that pace and the complacency of the markets is stunning sine any of those 362 80,000 units of infected people are, very obviously, capable of infecting 29M more more people.  

How much is 362 x 29M?  10.5Bn – that’s more people than there are on the planet potentially affected in the next 6 months.  Of course we are, theoretically, doing a better job of containing the spread but by “we”, I certainly don’t mean America, which is very likely to leap forward in cases by the end of the month…

Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.