Promoting Useful Knowledge

  If you’re not sure where this week’s title comes from, it’s the Counting Crows’ 1996 song, Long December . Their Twitter account posted it shortly after midnight on the east coast and I immediately knew it would be this week’s title. This is obviously not referencing performance in too many financial markets, but more about things outside of those. I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday season and is off to a fast start in 2021. This first post for 2021 will be much shorter than normal. I haven’t been doing as much with markets over the holiday. I caught up on a few movies and finished some books, more on that later. This week I’ll be watching the Senate runoffs in Georgia. According to Forbes , these races are now too close to call. There’s been a lot of discussion around what these two seats mean for the next two years in politics and fiscal policy. I think the markets overreact either way. There’s also the outstanding last ditch efforts of the GOP to somehow keep control of t...

  This week's title is a tribute to one of my favorite artists of all time. Bob Dylan wrote many of the songs of an entire decade. The title comes from his famous ' Like a Rolling Stone ', if you listen to the lyrics they are a little similar to that which a trade might feel when they've blew out their account and are starting from scratch. I also reference Mr. Dylan because I'll cover him below in the best of the week, which is actually a group of links this week on alternative investments in the music industry. Many of you saw the news around the highly publicized Airbnb and DoorDash IPOs. They weren’t the only names to price last week. There were 28 IPOs and 20 SPACs that went public last week. Four of the IPOs finished 100% above their offer price. It’s going to stay very active through year end with at least two dozen names still expected to price. Disney ended the week with a monster day after their investor day. Disney+ subs were the story here, and honestly ...

  There has never been a better time in history to sell the major indices. Well, that’s because they’re at all-time highs. Let's just hope we're not Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon.  Aside from the continued march higher, A couple of big M&A deals were announced last week. The official announcement of the Salesforce (CRM) acquisition of Slack (WORK.O). S&P Global and IHS Markit announced a $44B all-stock deal. Talks of delisting Chinese stocks from US exchanges continued, and it’s not what I originally thought with those stocks moving to the OTC market. OPEC+ kept us waiting, but they’ve announced a small production hike of 500k barrels per day for next month.  We’ve got a light earnings’ calendar again, but we’ve still got a few events on the week. Disney (DIS), Starbucks (SBUX,O), and Salesforce (CRM) are holding investor meetings. Some IPOs on the docket too. DoorDash (DASH.K) and Airbnb (ABNB.O) are the big ones, but there are six in total expected fo...

  I hope all my US readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was quite different for me not seeing any family other than my wife. She took the opportunity to get me to put up extra Christmas decorations. So, I took a queue from the US markets and will have a shorter than normal post. It’s not super short, but I left out a few things that I didn’t have time to write up. I included a few in the 'Just Links' section at the end. With an off day on Thursday and an abbreviated session on Friday, volumes were obviously lower than normal this week, but the American holiday also has an impact on the Canadian markets. They tend to trade less than half their normal volume on Thursday and about three quarters on Friday. Before the holiday, the Dow Jones closed above 30,000 for the first time. It took less than four years to get there from 20k versus the 18 years it took to get from 10k to 20k. Granted it’s a lot less in percentage terms. We also saw President Elect Biden announce that...

  For those of you that did not smile when you read the title, it's a reference to the cult classic Plans, Trains, and Automobiles. The 1980's movie is a journey of two men just trying to get home for Thanksgiving . If you've never seen it, please watch it. I feel like that movie is similar to the major indices just trying to get to the year end in positive territory.  There is still a lot to be thankful for. For one, we're not traveling for business as much this year having to deal with the Del Griffiths of the world. I'm happy not having to commute nearly 3 hours per day. I get to spend more time at home, granted much of it is still in front of the PC, but that's my choice. I'm thankful for a great group of colleagues that I get to work with everyday and a company to work for that has been so supportive this year. I'm thankful for the amazing content that people choose to share, much of it free. I've learned so much since starting this blog. In the...