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By Alex Eule |  Monday, April 4 Flipping the Script. Macro economic worries and geopolitical turmoil have been dominating the stock market for weeks now. And the issues haven't gone away. In fact, they feel more troubling and tragic.  But coming out of the weekend, investors were back to corporate news. And it was largely a positive for the market. Elon Musk sees value in social media, it seems, and his newly disclosed 9% stake in Twitter sent the stock to its best day ever. The billionaire's expanded faith in tech contributed to a banner day for the Nasdaq Composite, which closed up 1.9%. Strong quarterly deliveries for Tesla, Musk's other company, pushed the electric vehicle maker up 5.6% on the day. Starbucks was another big mover, with Howard Schultz beginning his third stint as the company's CEO. Schultz's first act was to suspend the company's stock buyback. “This decision will allow us to invest more into our people and our stores -- the only way to create long-term value for all stakeholders,” Schultz wrote in a letter he addressed to "Starbucks partners (employees), customers, communities, and shareholders." Those constituencies are sure to have different views on the buyback matter, and investors weren't crazy about Starbucks pulling back on its  cash return policy. Shares of the coffee giant finished down 3.7% on the day.  The yield on the 10-year rose 3.5 basis points, or 0.035 percentage point. The good news for investors is that the 2-year yield declined a tiny bit. Those contrasting moves mean a steepening in the yield curve, at least for today. The lending rates on the long-term and short-term notes are now slightly less inverted than they were late last week.  The abnormal dynamic in which shorter-term loans yield more than longer ones remains worrisome, but investors are learning to live with it. And if today's pattern continues, the inversion could soon be flipped, leaving everyone debating whether a brief "inversion" was enough to predict a recession, as it often does.  In Barron's this weekend, my colleague Randall Forsyth explained why all the inversion worries may actually be overblown.  Recessions linked to the yield curve have been rooted in tight Fed monetary policies, which eventually tipped the economy into a downturn. Now, the curve’s moves are based on anticipated, rather than actual, Fed actions. ...the spread between three-month and 10-year Treasury yields is actually the measure to watch, according to the model developed by former New York Fed economist Arturo Estrella. And that curve remains distinctly positive and well out of recession-prediction territory. ...The classic message sent by an inverted yield curve is that financial conditions are tight and portend a downturn. But broader measures, such as indexes constructed by Goldman Sachs and the Chicago Fed, which take equity and corporate credit markets into account, don’t show significant tightening. In fact, adjusted for inflation, Goldman’s index remains easy and suggests that the Fed should tighten even more than the market expects... Maybe investors are worrying for no reason? It's a nice thought for a day.

 

DJIA: +0.30% to 34,921.88 S&P 500: +0.81% to 4,582.64 Nasdaq: +1.90% to 14,532.55 The Hot Stock: Twitter +27.1% The Biggest Loser: Baxter International -4.0% Best Sector:  Communication Services +2.8% Worst Sector: Healthcare -0.8%