Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday. The S&P 500 was down .02% today, pretty much flat. Which actually isn’t a bad for a day when the Federal Reserve is meeting, because oftentimes we see some down days when they meet. They came together, they came out and said, “Hey, we’re probably going to have to start cutting back on our bond purchases”, which we’ve been doing to stimulate the economy, by the end of the year, maybe beginning next year. They’d already talked about that earlier, so there wasn’t a lot of surprise to the market there. We’ll see how that actually plays out.
The one thing I found most interesting about what they talked about was they said that they felt right now that the Delta Variant and the rise of that isn’t going to be a big economic impact. Matter of fact, Chairman Powell’s direct quote was, “this is something we’re getting much better at, getting used to operating our economy, in that environment”. So we’ll see how that does play out, because it’s somewhat important. We’ve got the scenario where things have really picked up, and that’s creating some shortages and what have you, and then the variant could slow things down. And that would make a difference as to when they start tapering back on purchasing these bonds, and when they possibly start raising interest rates.
Of course, the other aspect of what’s happening this week is earnings. So it’s really the two big things that drive stocks, in my opinion: The Federal Reserve’s actions and earnings. And we’ve got some of the biggest companies in the world reporting earnings this week: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook; after hours. All of them have had unbelievable numbers, I mean, really, really good stuff. It doesn’t always translate to higher stock price right away. Apple’s down today, even though I had one of the best reports I ever seen in my life. Again, because their guidance looking forward was, “Hey, we might have some trouble with the chip supply chain in order to sell more iPhones, for example.”
So, you know, those things all work their way out here over the over the short term. This is a really, really good environment for these companies to be operating in. Ford, you know, up their guidance actually had some good numbers too. So there’s some things that are happening that I think are quite positive as far as that goes. So, we’ll see how this plays out: I think the market is holding up fairly well for a week like this, where we have a lot of these different pieces coming in, and so really look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.