Good morning.
The Covid vaccine/stimulus narrative remains in full force. Stocks gave up a strong early morning gain, prompted in part by news of a new bipartisan stimulus package in addition to the first officially delivered vaccine. As it appeared that nothing would happen on the stimulus front yet again, however, we saw a drop in the afternoon.
Not to worry. As with the China trade deal narrative a few years back, we know that the moves these news headlines make will only move the overall markets a few percentage points either way. But they do create some buying opportunities. Combined with last week’s selloff, there are plenty of worthwhile stocks worth owning that are now no longer overbought. Remember, market sell-offs create buying opportunities.
Now here’s the rest of the news:
December 15, 2019
“People overestimate what can be done in one year, and underestimate what can be done in ten.” — JCR Licklider
Good Morning. As the market moves to new all-time highs again on a “Phase 2 Trade Deal” with China, a number of troubling signs loom. The largest is the repo market — where banks borrow from other banks overnight, often drawing on their reserves held at Federal Reserve banks to do so.
In the past few months, levels of repo activity have soared, along with overnight rates. This rise could spell some liquidity problems in the market. Should the situation fail to be contained by the repo market, a rush to liquidity could mean a market selloff, even if the overall economy improves. It’s a situation worth watching… and it’s why we continue to advise caution even with markets behaving so bullish lately.
Darren Hardy has, “A Cautionary Tale”
You’ve probably heard of Ivan Pavlov’s experiment where he rings a bell every time he feeds his dog.
After some time, the dog would salivate every time it hears the bell ring, even if there was no food. The dogs have associated the ringing of the bell with the food.
There have been reports of weather people being blamed, threatened, or even hurt be-cause people associate them with the bad weather they’ve reported about, even if these poor weather people have absolutely no control of nature. 🙂
