Transcript:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was down about a half percent today. But it was not alone. The Dow was down about .4%. The Nasdaq was down around 1%. And the Russell 2000, which is an index of basically small stocks was down 1.7%. So pretty big spectrum, you know, to the downside today, pretty even across the board there as far as that goes. And so one of the things that we always look for is, you know, why did that happen? Well, there wasn’t any real big catalysts today at all, actually, my guess would be that we have so many companies coming out with new earnings reports here this week. And next. So for example, 81 of the S&P 500 companies are reporting earnings in the next, you know, this week and next, and 10 of the Dow company. So, this is a big deal, because what’s happening there, we’ve had so many upside surprises, that I think the market is kind of settling back down, you know, we did have a great week, last week also. So it certainly has a chance to settle a bit too.
But, you know, are these earnings surprises going to continue? And where are they going to come from what type of companies are making the money and not making the money this is you’re gonna, we’re gonna know a lot more in a couple of weeks about what’s going on here. So and there’s another compounding aspect of this, generally speaking, companies very often will issue guidance for what’s going to happen in the next quarter. And, you know, starting about this time, last year, companies really stopped issuing guidance, because they had a really tough time figuring out what was going to happen, you know, with this pandemic, some of that has come back. But that’s also, you know, not completely back, which just means that the reports now are more important, especially to the analysts, and possibly to the market as a whole, as far as that goes.
So I think that’s what’s happening here, a very exciting to see what happens, you know, there are some risks in the market right? Essentially, maybe inflation comes up too hard, too fast, and it makes the Fed change their mind. You know, they talked about raising rates in 2023. And, you know, but maybe they have to do it earlier, because inflation comes up so hard, they’ve said that they won’t, but that’s possibility, we could have some type of vaccine, you know, resistant variant on the virus, right. So that’s a potential risk.
We also right now even have some geopolitical risk going on with, you know, Ukraine, and Taiwan. So those are things that are happening, you know, at any point time, you can always find some things that are not perfect. But when you really look at the other side of the ledger, and you look at this pent up demand, and all the money that people saved 50% of you know, American adults now I’ve had at least one shot, I saw an article that said, we will be at herd immunity in America in 1.9 months. I think one of the problems, at least at the pace that we’re going, I don’t think we’ll actually get there, unfortunately, because we have some people that don’t want to take the vaccine. But it just shows you the pace, it’s really good pace, we’re moving very quickly, right now with the vaccine and whole, which again, leads to this potential reopening happening a lot faster, and commerce happening quicker, more upside, surprise, interest rates, possibly going to stay down for quite a while. So you know, I think that the the, the catalysts for the upside outweigh the catalysts for the downside there. But there’s one that’s kind of a weird one.
So if the market, you know, economy really takes off, the inflationary pressure could become an issue. So that’ll be very fascinating. See how that plays. So far, one of the things I have noticed is that that inflationary pressure, especially the yield on the bonds, seems to be you know, kind of taken back by the global situation. So although the US could reopen quite quickly, we could see some bond increases. But if we don’t see bond increases, and other places, you know, in terms of the yield of the world, all of a sudden, they’re buying our bonds, which again, brings our yields back down, which is exactly what happened in this last go around. So for inflation, to really be a factor for the Fed to really get in there and do something, I think we need to see kind of this global inflation come through, which could happen, but I’d be a little bit surprised if that happens this year.
You know, we’re doing really well with the vaccine distribution, but the rest of the world, in general is pretty far behind. And I don’t think we’re gonna see full reopenings and lots of vaccine, you know, delivery for the rest of the world until later on in the year as far as that goes at the pace that it seems to be going so far. So we’ll see how that plays out.
So, again, thank you very much for coming to Go Live with Tom on Friday. And again, thank you for subscribing. We’ve been putting a bunch of new videos on the channel. I’m really big on trying to increase investor education. I believe that investor education, there’s a direct link between that and increasing your wealth and so that’s what we’re trying to do. So we got a lot of new videos coming on so people and we won’t be sending those out in the emails to many of us actually don’t want to inundate you. But if you are interested in being notified when those are, hit the subscribe button and the little bell and you’ll get notification about those also So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you very much