Here’s the weekly rundown – August 30 – Sept 3, 2021
Weekly Summary:
Who doesn’t love a winning streak?? Probably only weird people who short stocks..
Anyway, it might have been a quieter week as far a market-moving news goes but that didn’t stop the S&P 500 from chalking up its 7th consecutive month of positive gains. The S&P 500 was up 2.9% in August marking the longest winning streak by the index since 2017.
This is in a year that the index is already up over 20% still with 3 months left to go. But what might be even more surprising than the massive winning rally out of a “world pandemic” is what company sectors are leading the rally… Want to guess?
Futuristic innovative electric car, rocket, or tech companies -i.e. Information Technology.???
Nope. It’s the Financial? and Energy? sectors which are up 52% and 38% respectively over 12 months. Hard to believe until you compare say American Express YTD to Apple YTD.
Yet, the biggest question of the week wasn’t about what sectors are doing best, it was, what happened with nonfarm payroll in August? The expectation was that the economy would add some 730,000 jobs dropping unemployment, increasing productivity, and leaving more people out there with spending money to keep boosting the economy.
Turns out, we missed that number by a mile adding only 235,000 new jobs in August…
While the payroll number is only one figure it brings a small amount of uncertainty as we head into September, historically worst month for stocks.
What’s up with China?
Break out the low-tech board games…Apparently, mom and dad aren’t the only ones who don’t want kids wasting away on video games, China’s government doesn’t either. This week China’s National Press and Publication Administration announced a ban on minors from playing video games Monday through Thursday and restricted them to only one hour per day on the weekend.
How would you enforce such a rule? Likely this will be through a combination of government ID checks when someone creates an account and videogame providers using facial recognition technology. –See Article
The Major Headlines:
Tesla wants to sell electricity in Texas
Not only will Tesla sell you a fancy electric car, soon they might also sell you the electricity to drive it. A division of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures filed paperwork with the Texas public utility commission to sell electricity directly to customers there.
However, the electricity would likely come from the energy storage system Tesla is currently building in Arlington not necessarily from green energy. Instead, possibly store unused electricity being produced during low consumption hours. –See Article
Hurricane Ida
Category 4 hurricane Ida hit New Orleans Sunday and while a hurricane is never good in a city below sea level the city came through relatively well. The same cannot be said for the Northeast which is dealing with major flooding from Ida resulting in more than 50 people dead. –See Article
New abortion law isn’t stopped by Supreme Court
A new law banning abortion after about six weeks went into effect in Texas on Thursday. This is after the US Supreme Court declined to intervene leaving many to wonder about the future of Roe v. Wade.
That said, there are quite a few unnormal aspects of the new Texas law which only make things more unclear. The major one being enforcement of the law is up to citizens, not the state. –See Article
NFT Craze hits new heights
Forget Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and meme stocks, the new investing trend among the “Day-Trading Army” is non-fungible tokens (NFTs). August proved to be the month with the largest trading volume for NFTs on “OpenSea”, the largest NFT exchange, where total sales jumped to $3 billion.
What really is an NFT? Good question. Essentially NFT’s use blockchain (think computer code) to certify that a digital asset is unique and not interchangeable. This way you can verify that your pdf picture of pokemon is not the same as the others on google images.
And with that, enjoy the long weekend! –See Article
Want this in your inbox? Get it for free
