MARKET RECAP

US stocks were up by 2.3% and international equities by 1.23%. As expected, the Fed said it would begin its unwind of its bond buying program but said interest rates would remain the same. Covid numbers continue to improve and to top it off, Pfizer announced it has developed an anti-viral that was 89% effective, topping the recent drug that Merck is bring to market (50%).

The October jobs report was excellent. The economy added 531,000 jobs, the biggest gain in three months. August and September numbers were revised up by 235,000. The current economy trails the pre-Covid total job number by 4.2 million. The unemployment rate fell to 4.6% from 4.8% and the participation rate remained steady at 61.6%. On the negative side, US worker productivity fell at an annualized rate of 5%, the largest quarterly decrease since 1981.

Jack Hough’s column in this week’s Barron’s is titled “Weird Finance”, and talks about NFTs, cryptos and more of the craziness that zero percent interest rates and money everywhere has unleashed. Somewhere down the line, if people ask “what were they thinking?”, this article might be a good place to start.

Tesla’s market cap increased by over $300 billion during the last week of October. On Tuesday, Avis went up in price, at its high, by 217% on Tuesday, but would close 35% off that number. Two examples of some of the mania in this market.

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