Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday. The S&P 500 was up a half a percent today, and actually everything was up. The NASDAQ was down at the beginning of day, but it turned around and came up; The Russell 2000, the Dow. Was actually a pretty good day, we had some record closes for a whole bunch of the stock indexes, even though they weren’t huge, but we’ve been kind of crawling up, at a pretty nice pace actually.
The big news that came out today really, again, had to do with employment, this is kind of the employment week as a whole. Tomorrow’s the big number: How many new jobs are created? The expectation is 700,000. We’ll find out tomorrow morning, and our report that in tomorrow’s weekly summary. But today, what they report is how many people claimed unemployment, really kind of first time claims. And it was the lowest it’s been since the pandemic started, and so that’s a good sign that continues to come down. So, the labor markets getting a little bit better as far as that goes, and we’re starting to see some recovery there.
We did see a little bit of run up on the 10 year Treasury based on that number. Again, if you watch really closely for inflationary pressure, it often revolves around employment, because it’s one of the biggest costs for companies, as far as that goes. So tomorrow going to be watched pretty heavily, as far as that goes, we’ll see what happens. Things are doing pretty well. Value did better today in our portfolios, than some of the Growth pieces. One area that’s been running quite nicely recently is kind of that advanced health care area, the genomics and what have you, that did really well really this time last year, and everything in that kind of area hit a peak, mid February. But we’re seeing pretty good recovery and re-movement back into that area.
We’ve seen energy and oil do quite well in this environment, also. Matter of fact, price of crude got over $75, really for the first time in a while. Oil is a weird deal because, there’s a lot of people that could produce more if they wanted to, and so when the price gets up pretty high, sometimes they’ll turn them up a bit, and that’ll bring down the price, so it can be a little bit of a volatile commodity, as far as that goes. But it does show an increasing world demand. I think slowly but surely we’re seeing all kinds of things that are happening globally, where we’re seeing the mobility data that shows how much people are moving around, getting closer and closer to where it was February of 2020, before the pandemic. Still has a ways to go, especially in some of these countries, but it’s going in the right direction. And so things are starting to improve here all together, and we’ll see what that means.
Again, the real key here is that you don’t want the economy to do too poorly, and you don’t want us to do too well either, as far as the stock market is concerned. Right now, because of what’s happening internationally, it looks like our stock market is being allowed to kind of float along in what I call this “Goldilocks Zone”, and so that’s a good thing, too. So, anyway, look forward to talking to you tomorrow. We’re having our Talk Money with Tom show tomorrow. 12:15pm to one o’clock, feel free to join us. Send in any questions as soon as you want or during the show, and we can answer those, also. And I’ll be doing a summary for the week tomorrow, so you can see that also and see what what I thought kind of was important for this week, as far as that goes. I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you very much.