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By Alex Eule
| Thursday, December 2 On
the Other Hand. Another day of
volatility dominated stocks today. This time, though, it led to broad
gains across the market. (Stop us if we sound like a broken record. ) After two
days of worry, Omicron concerns receded a bit, opening the door to a
buy-on-the-dip type trading. To understand market sentiment, look no
further than shares of Moderna and Pfizer, which
both fell on the day, as investors focused more on reopening plays and less
on vaccine makers. Travel
stocks made big moves, with JetBlue
Airways up 7.7%, Marriott
International up 6.1%, and Norwegian
Cruise Line up 7.7%. The Dow
Jones Industrial Average jumped 618
points, or 1.8%, its largest one-day point gain since Nov. 9, 2020, the day Pfizer and BioNTech announced positive
trial data on their Covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps
fittingly, today's gain was very much about Pfizer's vaccine, as well, and
the idea that a return-to-normalcy is still on the way. Overnight, a
Pfizer executive told
Bloomberg Television that the company was confident its
vaccine would still work against the Omicron variant. “We don’t expect that
there will be a significant drop in effectiveness." That's a
starkly different view from the one that Moderna CEO Stéphane
Bancel shared with the
Financial Times on Tuesday. He said he expected Covid vaccine
effectiveness to see "a material drop," adding that scientists
had told him, "This is not going to be good." That downbeat view
tanked markets and have generally set the stage for mid-week trading, until
today. The bottom
line is we still don't have real answers. But, as per usual, Wall Street
isn't waiting around to get the details. It will continue to make
minute-by-minute adjustments to its discounting methods -- until, at least,
we have more certainty about Omicron. In the
meantime, though, it's fair to say worries and the resulting volatility is
ebbing a bit. After yesterday's big rise, the Cboe Volatility
Index was
down 10% today, albeit to a still elevated level of 28, nearly double
this summer's low. Amid the
reopening focus, energy was a big winner. Crude oil was up
1.4% on the day, while energy stocks soared. The S&P 500
energy sector overall was up 2.9%. Technology was the worst performing
sector, up only 0.9%. |
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DJIA: +1.82% to 34,639.79 The Hot
Stock: Kroger +11.0% Best Sector:
Financials +3.0%
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