I've found the stock market interesting the last few days. The COVID spike of the last week doesn't seem to faze it, since a lot of the modern economy works well under lockdown or even thrives on it, as people use techie things more and biotech firms are the golden children of the era.
This morning, the market continued its climb, with a surprisingly good jobs report and news Boeing got its 737-MAX passed a re-certification test to get back in the air after being grounded for over a year after a balky avionics system helped cause a pair of fatal crashes.
That is, until news of Florida hitting a new daily COVID record hit. Reuters reported a five-figure case number for today; the old record of 9585 was set last Saturday (sad commentary that I have such links at the ready). It's nice that employment was up last month, but how long will it last? Boeing might have the MAX getting back in the air, but will they have folks using it to get somewhere if we're not ramping our travel back up right away? Earlier in the week, the Boeing news was that a Norwegian airline was backing out of a 737-MAX deal on COVID grounds.
The biggest S&P 500 ETF got up to 315.70 about 10AM, but shot back down to 312.66 (as I go to press at 11:11) on the Reuters article. Finance is in large part about predicting the future and how particular firms (or the market at large) is going to fit into that future. God knows and controls the future, but He's not overly chatty about the stock market. Thus, figuring out said future and attaching values to companies is a mix of art, science and SWAGs (scientific wild-[keister] guesses).
Interesting times, indeed.
Full disclosure- I'm in a pro-volatility fund right now, since I'm expecting trouble, so I have some bad schadenfreude about a market drop, given that I'm profiting from it.
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