Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. The S&P 500 was up again, today: .15%. We hit new highs on the S&P 500 again, and new highs on the NASDAQ also again; two days in a row. And the Dow actually hit the second highest close that it’s been at so far, too. So, we’re getting close to a new high there, also.
All of this is in response to kind of what happened last week when things came down, and once you get back into new highs, that’s pretty much the official endgame for that downturn: We’re now back into another run to the upside, or maybe sideways or what have you. But, the fear and the risk that was happening during that downturn, where it might go, the dip buyers came in and really held this thing together quite well.
We have seen for the second day in a row: Small Cap stocks, which like the Russell 2000, was up almost 1.1% today; so a lot more than the S&P 500. And then energy related stocks, actually, which had a good day yesterday, had a good day today. Both of these are down quite a bit from their highs, and so it’s kind of interesting that there might be some kind of buying coming in there also. Theoretically, they do better both of those cases when the economy is recovering and reopening. With the Delta Variant coming in, maybe there’s some hope: Looking out again, 6 to 18 months, that they figure out a way to deal with the virus, and things get to reopen a little bit faster than they have been; so we’ll have to wait and see what happens there.
We’ve got quite a few things coming up on Friday: The Federal Reserve Chairman Powell will be speaking. He is… they’re all meeting. Usually they go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for this big conference, and then they have a presentation for what they think is happening at the end of the week. They’re doing it virtually this year again, because of the virus. But it’s a really big deal. The markets will probably be kind of sitting around, waiting for what they talk about, but obviously the big subjects that they keep talking about, are when they’re going to cut back on purchasing the bonds, and when they might raise interest rates as far as that goes.
The market always gets a little bit volatile around those timeframes. One of the things that we’re really looking at though right now… the first thing they’re looking at, of course, is the repurchase of these bonds. And the slowing down: We had a little bit of slowdown here with some of the retail sales and things like that, probably being caused by the Delta Variant, as far as that goes. Maybe allows them to wait a little bit longer till they stop some of the purchase of those bonds, so we’ll have to see what happens. But that’s going to be an actually fairly important piece of what’s going on.
All together, we keep hitting all time highs: The market is doing well, and it seems very, very strong; and the dip buying that comes in, is really amazing. You’ll have to see how that goes long term but it’s really been fun to watch how this goes. Anyway, look forward to talking to you tomorrow and see what’s gonna happen then. Thank you very much.