Transcript
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. Good day for us today, all together, the S&P 500 was up .3%. But our pieces and the portfolio we had several do significantly better. To our clean energy pieces, we’re at 4.1 and 2.7%. Our advanced medical was up 2.4, you know, online retail of 1.7, we had great moves out of Smart Mobility, innovative technology, et cetera. So really, really good.
I like to spend some time talking about a possible positive path that we might go down next year. And so it’s important to understand this is not a prediction, what this is, is a possible path that we can look at to go with the other paths that might happen. And so, you know, neuroscience tells us that we are hardwired from our ancient biology to really hunt for risk. And that’s how we survive, we have a survival technique. And unfortunately, as an investor, we kind of have to fight that a little bit. Because if we only hunt for risk, we basically wouldn’t invest, we need some of the positive to go with the negative concepts in the hunt for risk, to get to be a good investor and to get to that spot. So let’s walk down a possible path, a positive path for next year. And so let’s just start with this month.
So December, we start to get the vaccine out, really, they’re talking about the first 24 million people, these are frontline workers in the hospital. These are people that work in the nursing homes, as well as the patients in the nursing homes. And let’s just say it works, you know, the side effects aren’t that great. And the markets really excited about this, believe me, it’s going to be tuned into that we’ve built in a lot of run here in the market for the vaccine news. But the reality of having it work is going to make the market really go. And so then the next wave is supposed to be about 87 million people. And these are other people that work in the hospital or the fire and, you know, police and those types of things. And so again, let’s just say that starts to work by April,. Half the population is, you know, now got the vaccine, or can you see a lot of joy, you know, we’ve been locked up in our homes for the first time in our lives for a really long time, we haven’t been able to see friends and relatives as much as we want. Now we can, we can go out to eat, we can do all these things, consumer spending really starts to grow. We’ve saved a lot of money in 2020, because we couldn’t spend it as easily. And consumer spending is two thirds of the, you know, economy. So man travel, and all of these things start to take off by the summer, things are starting to get back, you know, start to look a little bit more normal. And again, consumer spending is continuing to grow. October comes around, and the kids under 12 are starting to get the vaccine once it’s working. And so during this period of time, we’re starting to see record earnings, because all of these companies have two things going for them.
Number one, they’ve been forced into this very efficient digital world. And so profits are picking up. And the other companies that are now starting to recover are kind of lean and mean, you know, they’ve had to cut costs substantially. And all of a sudden, there’s this huge influx of new money coming in, and profits are going to skyrocket in that environment. So now combine this with this kind of feeling of just pure joy, because we’re all able to kind of get out. And what euphoria and joy create is a willingness to take more risk. And people start to look at the trillions of dollars as they have in money markets and all of 15 trillion supposedly, that’s in the banking system. And you know, it’s not making any money, and I’m feeling very positive things are working, I’m feeling like things are going better. And so money starts to come into the stock market at at really record pace as far as that goes. And so you know, this is a scenario. It’s not a prediction, but it’s a scenario that we need to kind of put into that positive bucket to go right next to that negative bucket of all those things, create more balance, create more scenarios that we can start to see where things could work. It’s kind of a fun, you know, exercise.
As far as that goes, I hope it comes true, we would see some really great things happen. But I’m really excited to kind of continue to talk about these things with you and try to be your source for that kind of positive information to go with what else is out there. So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. You know, the market is really hopping right now, all together. And I’m very excited about that. And we’re seeing some of the pieces that we have do quite well here. So I look forward to talking tomorrow. Thank you very much.