Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello everybody, welcome to Wednesday. The S&P 500 was up .22%, today. And we got to a new all time high of 4501 points on the S&P 500, today. Again, third day in a row with a record high; at least during the day. Really fantastic timeframe, actually. And one of the things: There’s a couple of drivers that are happening right now. Lots of crosscurrents are always happening, but we’re seeing some interesting pieces, make moves. Energy and financials, small value stocks: All of those are things that do well, because of the reopening. And so the announcement on Monday that they were going to they’re giving full approval to the Pfizer vaccine, I think is one of the big catalysts there. So that I suppose the thought process is that might be more people to take the vaccine because of that full approval, there might be more companies that make it mandatory; and so the market is looking at that as a possibility that the reopening happens a bit quicker than it has been recently.
At the same time, you’ve got the government still working on this big infrastructure bill, and this big $3.5 trillion budget bill. There was some movement on that last night, and that seems to have kind of helped things too. So we’ll have to see how that plays out: It is the government, it’s not easy to get some of these things through; but we’ll see how that plays. And so the last piece of course, the Federal Reserve, which was meeting this week. And really what I’m hoping for, and I’d love to hear on Friday, when Chairman Powell comes out and speaks, it’s just that they’re going to have some flexibility in their thought process of starting to taper back on the purchase of these bonds.
Setting a hard timeline in this environment could be a problem. I think they need some flexibility; I’d love to hear them talk about some of that. So far, that seems to be what they’re talking about, but the minutes that were released last week, that kind of caused part of that downturn, they seem to have some more hard timelines in place. And so again, it’s been a while since that last meeting, and a lot of different things have happened; so hopefully, we are able to kind of see some flexibility out of there, at least comments as far as that goes. So we’ll see what happens.
But those are three of the big things that are happening: The full approval of the vaccine, the the big budget bills that are out there and infrastructure bill and then the Federal Reserve. So there’s actually a fair amount happening for the last week of August, and the market just continues to eek out new highs, which is fantastic. So look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.