Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello everybody, welcome to Monday. The S&P 500 was up a little bit more than 1.3% today, which was a really good move, very strong market all the way across the board. Friday was a really interesting day, obviously, a big down day, reacting to this new variant, this Omicron variant that came out. And so really interesting, I thought today was sort of a buying opportunity. We actually did purchase Costco in some of our portfolios, and did that specifically for the fact that inflation has been fairly high. Seems like a lot of people are moving towards a lower cost place like Costco to fight inflation. And so that’s been a good deal. And then the other part is really adding AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, to some of the portfolios to go with our Nvidia holding. The semiconductor arena, in the research that I’ve been doing, is definitely the big area.
Normally, I would buy an exchange traded fund that buys basically all the the different semiconductor companies, but some of the big ones like Taiwan Semi and was having trouble with kind of the China market. And then of course, Intel’s been having its own problems. So just buying the two big ones that are doing really well, that’s worked out great. We’re up a lot on Nvidia, for example, which we bought a few weeks back.
So, really interesting time in the sense that if you look at this virus, and again, I’m not a doctor, but I do study the virus a lot, especially as it impacts the economy and the stock market, and what we have seen as in each wave that we’ve had, we’ve had less impact on the economy and ultimately on the stock market. I think people are getting more used to it. There’s more vaccinated people, there’s more people that are just going about their business irregardless. And so it doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the past. A lot to learn about this particular variant, it does seem to spread pretty quickly. But how, how bad are the symptoms? So far, they seem to be light, but the people are young, so we’ll have to see how that plays out, what happens with the vaccinated people and those types of things.
So irregardless, if we look back to the very beginning, we didn’t even have a vaccine, the market’s almost up 100% since then. And so you know, the keys are still there: low interest rates, easy money, no place else to go, those are the things that are driving the stock market that hasn’t changed, and really won’t change as far as that goes. Matter of fact, a 10 year Treasury dropped on Friday, making stocks, again, I think even more, you know, desirable, ultimately, in a low interest rate environment.
So again, I always try to keep my eye on the basics. And when we’ve got low interest rates and lots of money flowing out and what have you, you know, it can usually survive some of these waves of virus that’s coming. You know, the Delta Variant happened this summer, you know, and we still had a 25% stock market increase for the year so far. It did have an impact, we probably would have made even more without it. Because we had supply chain issues and people not coming back to work because of the Delta Variant. But, still the third quarter earnings for the S&P 500 were over 36% in gains, year over year. So I thought this was a buying opportunity. And I still think it is this is still a bull market. Still, until rates get a lot higher, or something else comes along that really can be you know, a detractor from buying stocks. I think this is the area to be in. And we’re you know, we’ll continue to see some good gains here as far as that goes. So, look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen tomorrow and I’ll talk to you then thank you very much.