December 12, 2021

The Weekend Rip: The Final Countdown

Happy Sunday. It’s Weekend Rip time!

Stocks gained some much-needed reprieve this week, with most major indexes rising over 3%. The Dow Jones led the indexes, notching a 3.86% gain this week. The exception to the “3% rise” was the Russell 2000 (as it always seems to be), which rose just 2.39%.

With a 3.6% rise this week, the S&P 500 solidified itself as the strongest index of the year — it’s up 27.3% YTD. The only index even close is the Nasdaq Composite, which is up 23.1% YTD. The rest of the indexes lay far below.

That said, the year is almost over. There are just 14 trading days left in the year! That means we’re going to start taking score of the winners, cutting our losers (for the sake of beautiful tax loss harvesting), and leaning into the holiday season.

On the flip, crypto HODLers need not take a holiday if they don’t want one. The markets are open 24/7. However, we bet they wish they were on vacation given their recent losses. Last week, crypto took a haircut – and this week, major cryptos mostly traded sideways.

In large-cap action: $BTC.X rose just 1.8% this week and $ETH.X fell 0.4% this week. Ethereum has stayed relatively strong amid a pullback in the broader market, helping it regain some of its market cap dominance. However, it has a ways to go before it can get back to its 2017 bull market greatness:

The biggest losers in the top-25 cryptos were $SOL.X (-8.8%) and $ALGO.X (-9.2%). The biggest winners were Tron (+9.2%) and Chainlink (+6.7%).

The crypto market cap weighed in at $2.3 trillion today, up 2.6%. It’s down over $450 billion from its ATH. Can it regain the high ground?

Here are the closing prices:

S&P 500	4,712	+3.60%
Nasdaq	15,630	+3.39%
Russell 2000	2,211	+2.39%
Dow Jones	35,970	+3.86%

Bullets

Bullets from the Week

Labor movement on the rise: A renewed labor movement in the U.S. is giving many brands looks of consternation. A Starbucks store in Buffalo, NY voted to unionize this week, potentially opening the door for other stores to follow suit. We covered how separate union drives at John Deere, Amazon, Kellogg’s, and Activision Blizzard might bare fruit in the top story of our Dec. 9 edition of the Rip, “The Year of the Union.”
The inflation situation: The consumer price index (CPI) data release on Friday showed that America’s inflation hit a 39-year high in November. With a 0.8% jump in the month, inflation notched 6.8% YoY growth. Despite the high figures, economists were banking on a number north of 7%. On the news, the S&P 500 rallied to a record close.
Record job openings: Investors would usually expect Q1 to be the hot time to hire. However, a report from the U.S. Labor Department shows company bucking the trend — in October, there were over 11 million job openings available, even as resignations began to subside. That means that there were 1.5 job openings per unemployed worker. We covered the data as the top story in our Dec. 8 edition of the Rip, “Over The Hump.”
Intel to spinoff self-driving unit: After a year of paltry returns in Intel stock, the company announced its plans to spin off its self-driving Mobileye unit in an effort to “create value for Intel shareholders.” Mobileye reportedly booked $442 million in operating income in the trailing 12 months, according to a report from Wells Fargo, which will help justify the company’s $50 billion public valuation. Read more in a segment pulled from our Dec. 7 edition of the Rip.
The SEC’s triple-threat: On Monday, the SEC notified Tesla, Lucid Motors, and Trump’s SPAC that they were under investigation. Tesla’s investigation has to do with potential hardware defects, reported by a whistleblower. The Trump and Lucid investigations have to do with SPAC-related antics. We summarize what we know about the SEC’s investigations in the top story of the Nov. 6 Rip.
The good and bad of crypto: The Friday edition of our new crypto newsletter, The Litepaper, was a blockbuster. Ethereum scaling solution Polygon shelled out over $600 million to acquire a protocol researching tech to make Ethereum faster, the CTO of decentralized exchange SushiSwap resigned after a scandal broke out in its ranks, and Solana was DDoSed. Dig deeper in our Dec. 10 edition of The Litepaper.

The Brief

Here’s a brief for the week of Monday, Dec. 13, 2021:

Economic Calendar:

12/14 Producer Price Index (PPI) & Core PPI (8:30 AM ET)
12/15 Retail Sales (8:30 AM ET)
12/15 EIA Crude Oil Inventories (10:00 AM ET)
12/15 FOMC Rate Decision (2:00 AM ET)
12/16 Housing Starts & Building Permits (8:30 AM ET)
12/16 Initial & Continuing Claims (8:30 AM ET)

Peep the full Economic Calendar provided by Briefing for all the reports this week.

We’re wounding down Q4 earnings this week. There are no notable earnings on Monday or Wednesday, but here’s what the community will be watching on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday: