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By Alex Eule
| Monday, December 14 The
'New Snow Day.' Stocks fell for a
fourth consecutive trading session, with the S&P
500 down
0.4% today. The move fits the market's favorite axiom: Buy
the rumor, sell the news. The news was that Pfizer's Covid-19
vaccine has finally reached more than 100 locations in the U.S., with
hundreds more to come this week, and the vaccinations have begun. We saw video
of UPS and FedEx airplanes
taking off with the precious cargo, Pfizer employees loading pallets of vaccines into
cold storage, and nurses and others getting
the first shots. They are the most hopeful images of a somber
2020 and signal the beginning of the end for the pandemic. Now,
investors are left looking for the next wave of good news. It could come from
Congress, which continues to work on potential
stimulus plans. Or possibly from the IPO market. Or near-term
economic data. But risks
remain, most notably that the virus toll continues to mount, forcing new
economic shutdowns throughout the world in the weeks and months to come. Tech will
continue to help us bridge the gap, but it's not perfect. Early today,
a Google outage forced
businesses and schools to scramble. In Michigan, one school
district reliant on Google for communications closed for the day.
In an interview with The
Wall Street Journal, a school-district
spokeswoman called it "the new snow day." (With storms bearing
down on the East Coast of the U.S., many thousands of
children could be treated to the joy of a real snow day this
week. My kids are looking forward to that rare bit of 2020 normalcy.) For now
investors aren't giving up on their 2020 hedges: Stay-at-home stocks
were among the day's best performers, including Peloton (+4.1%) and Netflix (+3.8%), while retailers were hurt. Macy's was down 6.8% and Nordstrom was down 3.4%. |
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DJIA: -0.62% to 29,861.55 The Hot
Stock: Alexion
Pharmaceuticals +29.2% Best Sector:
Technology +0.4%
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