Transcript
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday, I apologize for the late posting, I had a water break inside the walls of my home here. So I’ve got an army of plumbers that were here finally got a chance to be able to record the video. So today, the S&P 500 was down .55%. It was really kind of a wild ride all together today, things were doing okay. And then towards the end, they stopped. And everything kind of ended up down. As far as that goes, there’s a couple of interesting pieces. First of all, energy was up quite a bit today, the two energy pieces that we have were up, you know, over 2% today, even in the down day, and obviously, that’s related to what happened in the Suez Canal.
There is a ship that is 224,000 tons, that’s almost a quarter of a mile long, that has got itself lodged sideways in the canal, blocking traffic. And it’s a really big deal, because roughly 12% of the world’s trade goes through the Suez Canal, and 10% of the world’s oil goes through the Suez Canal. So when it gets blocked, you know, we saw a big jump in oil prices today, because of that, you know, we’ll see if that has any real meaningful impact. From what I’ve read that, you know, for just two or three days, it doesn’t make a big difference, because a lot of these shipping companies kind of build that into their, you know, program as possible delays. If it’s longer than that, it could have some impacts. There’s 20,000 containers on the ship, which I find kind of incredible. So anyway, that was happening today, as well as what we’re seeing here this week, so far is very interesting.
The individual investor, who they really felt was going to come in very strongly here, maybe even specifically on the tech side, but with the all these stimulus checks, that’s what we saw, you know, this time last year when the stimulus came out for the Cares Act. And we’re not seeing that. And matter of fact, there’s a research study that was just completed, they look at 9000 different stocks and ETFs, and mutual funds to try to look at, you know, who’s buying, and the individual is kind of pulled back here over the last couple of weeks. Specifically, they’re down. So they’ve lost an average of 11%, looking at the trades that were made, you know, since the middle of February, so perhaps, you know, some of the newer investors are still kind of digesting, they did say that this happened also in September and October, when things were pulled back, and then they all came rushing back in again. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens, their value did much better today than the market as a whole, which was great.
And I really feel like we’re going to end up with a pretty long runway here. On the upside, once things get rolling. A third of a adults here in the US are vaccinated and they’re accelerating 2 million per day. And 40 states are on track to meet the concept of being able to open up the you know, vaccinations to all ages by May 1. So, you know, things are accelerating, they’re, you know, I just saw a big list of all the movie theaters that are opening even the one that I go to at Santana Row. So, you know, things are starting to progress. Some you know, we’ll have to wait and see how this really plays out. But I do think that we’re going to see a tremendous amount of money and maybe the money that isn’t coming into the market from the stimulus will end up going into the economy in terms of spending. So maybe this time, they decided to do something else with it in that in that regard. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
But really, you know, a couple of dynamics there. Now one thing that is important to understand the volumes down so when the market is not doing well and the volumes down, that’s actually in my opinion, historically been an okay thing. That means there aren’t that many sellers out there, there’s just not that many buyers either. So just you know, what you really don’t want to see is what we saw this time last year, where volume was skyrocketing high and the market is coming down and people are dumping everything. This seems to be just sort of this transitionary time period where we’re going through, you know, from lockdown to non lockdown, and just trying to get through that period worldwide. It’s going to be a little bit of a run, but we’ll see how that goes. So look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Talk to you then. Thank you