TGIF – Back Where We Started From to End the Week

“Standing in the middle of nowhere,
Wondering how to begin.
Lost between tomorrow and yesterday,
Between now and then.

And now we’re back where we started,
Here we go round again.
Day after day I get up and I say
I better do it again.

Where are all the people going?
Round and round till we reach the end.
One day leading to another,
Get up, go out, do it again.” – Kinks

It feels like something happened this week but it didn’t.  

The S&P began the week at 4,170 and we’re at 4,170 this morning.  The Dow is 100 points lower, which is a 5-minute move these days, the Nasdaq is surprising us at 13,500 as we thought 13,400 (the strong bounce line) would be as high as it goes and the Russell is right back to 2,220 – also no change at all.

I guess we could say that means that earnings are coming right in-line with expectations and everything was priced right – more or less.  Yeah, let’s go with that….  I thought Robert Kaplan’s comments on inflation would be of more concern to traders but nothing concerns traders – certainly not India breaking Donald Trump’s record (4,400) for covid deaths in a single day with 4,500 killed by Modi’s negligence.  Like Trump, Modi decided ignoring the virus was the way to go but, unlike Trump, no one removed him from office before it was too late (Trump hit his record for killing US Citizens just before being dragged out of office in January).  

In the US yesterday, “only” 675 people died of Covid and “only” 28,935 people were newly infected.  While it’s a huge improvement over the hundreds of thousands of new cases per day we had in January – it’s still a little early to celebrate.  We have lost our capacity to care about death and disease, apparently – as long as it doesn’t happen to us we just move right along.  India still hasn’t caught up to the US with only 26M cases (vs 33M) and “only” 291,000 deaths (vs 587,000) but they’ll get there…

Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.