Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
I’d like to start off the show with a summary of kind of what I saw happening in the stock market this week. I found this week to be very interesting. There’s a couple of things going on that that seemed to really be, you know, coming very clear as to why the market is doing so well. And what we’re seeing is that, essentially the beginning of October, when they said that they were going to resolve the debt ceiling, at least for a little while, the market started to come up, and it’s essentially been going up every day, including today.
Very, very hot market. And so one of the things to keep in mind is that there is a momentum that the market has. It’s like a giant ship, and once it gets moving in one direction, especially this quickly and this hard, it’s difficult for it to just immediately turn around. So we should get some carry through here for at least the short term. So that’s a good thing for all of us that are investors right now. But this week, really, the key catalyst event, in my opinion, had to do with the Federal Reserve meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then Chairman Powell, coming out and talking as a little speech and a question and answer, I thought there was some very interesting pieces.
One thing to keep in mind, the Federal Reserve is very, very important to the stock market. And they also have very good access to data. So it’s interesting to listen to them and hear what they’re talking about. And what Chairman Powell was talking about was the issue of inflation predominantly. And so they’re seeing the economy, moving along at a good enough pace, that they’re going to start cutting back on the bond purchases. They’ve been purchasing $120 billion worth of bonds, every month, they’re going to cut back about $15 billion a month, starting here in November. And by roughly June, they might be done. They might do it faster or slower, depending on what happens. But their big issue is running around inflation is that we’re seeing a labor pool that is not coming out to work. So the number of jobs created in August and September were very low, a lot lower than expectations. And he talked about how, they expected that job growth to be much higher, partly because the $300 extra unemployment was disappearing, and school was restarting. And it really didn’t help. He said that they’re the real issue seems to be the Delta Variant. And people being afraid to come out to work, or unable to come out to work because they can’t find childcare. In the chat, he talked about how the childcare business has been really struggling to try to find people to work in that business, also. Some people are afraid to send their kids to childcare. So as the virus comes down, he was saying they’re very curious to see what’s going to happen in an environment where the virus is lower, and people aren’t as afraid. Well, we’re starting to see some effects of that. So the virus is down. And in October, the number for the new jobs was just reported just a few hours ago: 531,000 new jobs. And the expectation was for 450,000 new jobs. So actually, we did better than expected, which is really good. And so that that’s a big deal.
As this virus comes down, we’ve got the scenario where people can come back to work, and it was talking about the supply chain issues being related to the labor issues. So it’s essentially impossible to make and deliver products at a higher rate if you can’t get people to come out to work. And so this is where all of these things are coming. And we had another interesting piece of news today that might help this labor issue, and that Pfizer has an antiviral drug that in testing, is 89% effective against people going to the hospital or… dying from the virus; even after they catch it. That’s a game changer. Essentially, what that would mean is that even if you weren’t vaccinated, you might be able to have fairly minor symptoms if you can take this pill. So we’ll see how that works out. That’s still in testing and what have you. But that might help the scenario where we get more people back to work, which then could help the supply chain issues. They expected the supply chain problems and bottlenecks to continue through maybe next June. But they were expecting those to start to mitigate start to come down. And with that they expected inflation to come down to a certain degree.
What has happened here is really fascinating. We’ve have this massive demand. Demand we’ve been talking about since this time last year and this pent up demand that’s coming through and we’re seeing it come out and we’re seeing a huge amount of demand for different products and what have you, and not being able to meet that demand. So think about this in a perfect world. The virus stays down, and/or this new antiviral drug comes out and it actually works and people start to come back to work, and we can actually start to meet the demand, you’re going to see company profits do really well in that environment. So, we’d have a situation where these two big bills are being worked on right now, they might even be voted on in the house here. The infrastructure bill, the Build Back Better program, both of which have now been set up so that they’re not as onerous on corporate taxation, or capital gains taxation, both of which would benefit the stock market. That’s partly why we’re seeing things move. But if those get passed, I think we’d see some kind of bump there also, just because that’s some more stimulative money coming into the market. They talked about keeping interest rates low still, until maybe the second half of next year. So that’ll be really interesting to see what they do with the Fed Funds Rate.
But this is a really, really fascinating time to be an investor right now, and things are going really well. We are seeing the companies that can operate in this environment of potentially low labor, higher inflation, supply chain constraints. We’re seeing those companies that have been able to demonstrate their ability to do well, doing even better in this upturn. So you’re Tesla’s which, for some reason, is able to deliver these cars, even though Ford is having trouble. You’ve got the situation with Nvidia that’s able to deliver, at least a fairly good rate, their chips. And you’ve got companies like Microsoft that can operate in this environment, just like they did during the pandemic, all having fantastic runs. We actually made some changes to our portfolios, to move into some of those areas that are doing quite well. Get ready for the electric vehicle car situation, that’s happening, too.
So really, really fascinating timeframe for the market and I look forward to being able to see you know, what’s gonna happen next week, and really keep that positive thoughts going. The positive thought here all together has won, all right? I mean, all the way since March of last year, those people that kept a positive outlook on what would happen with this market, focused on the basics, focused on the fact that interest rates are low, taxation is low, have done really well, and then you just basically look for those little trends to emerge and try to, you know, push some of your money towards some of those trends, and that’s basically what’s happened so far. So, we’ll see what happens, but things look very good. Could have very good fourth quarter earnings, because what we saw with the third quarter earnings, these companies are really doing a great job. So look forward to talking to you about that next week. We’ll give you a summary then. Thank you very much.