A change of tune has emanated from the Oval Office today, where President Trump has returned to work while he fights through his Covid-19 illness. Instead of pulling the plug on negotiations for a new stimulus package for American families and businesses continuing to struggle through the economic ramifications of the pandemic, the idea now is to have more of an a la carte approach to stimulus: sending out $1200 checks with the president’s signature on it and a $25 billion airline payroll stipend, among other things.
This bolstered indexes higher than they had fallen Tuesday: The Dow rose 530 points or 1.91%, the Nasdaq +210 points or 1.88% and the S&P 500 rose 58.40 or +1.74%. In what’s becoming a habit of late, the Russell 2000 small-cap index has once again outperformed the field on the day, +2.1%. Materials and Industrials performed well, as did Energy — in particular, Renewables. This can be seen in the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (NYSE:XLE) ICLN, which rose 5% on the day.
Airlines obviously took the news well, as American AAL bounced back 4.3% Wednesday, and Transports overall enjoyed their best single day of trading in nearly 3 months, +3.2% today. All of these factors indicate a market looking for a firming up of the domestic economy. Yes, a short-term stimulus is welcome, but beyond this there are expectations for economic traction to finally take hold as we fight our way through the “second wave of the coronavirus.
Even Tech stocks were up today, shrugging off a House Antitrust report on strategies to deal with companies like Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) FB and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) GOOGL and their perceived “monopoly” statuses. The report has no tactical bearing, but could point a way forward, especially if Democrats sweep both houses of Congress in the coming election. (Only Democrats in the House signed off on the report, no Republicans did.) Structural separations are instructed to take hold; however, the DoJ, FTC and other government bodies will also have a say on the findings going forward.
Basically, yesterday’s selloff resulted in a shake-out of investors highly motivated by a perceived stimulus package and little else. The true believers in the long-term U.S. economy were the ones to have benefited most today.
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