Weekly Market Bites

the financial news you need

Author

Al Atencio
October 18, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Welcome to your weekly market wrap-up.

The weekend is almost here, so grab a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and catch up on financial markets.

I’ve been doing the reading and scrolling, to bring you the most relevant updates.

end of week markets update

1) Without a doubt, the theme of the year in the financial world is the strength of the US economy and US financial markets.

The Economist this week put a report fittingly titled:

“In 1990 America accounted for about two-fifths of the overall GDP of the G7; today it is up to about half. On a per-person basis, US economic output is now 40% higher than in western Europe and Canada and 60% higher than Japan— roughly twice the gaps between them in 1990.

In the 20th century American equities produced a real dollar return of 7% per year, versus 4.9% in the rest of the world.

That gap may sound small, but such is the power of compound interest that an investor in only American stocks would have ended the century more than seven times richer than an investor only in stocks elsewhere.”

The Economist

Mind blowing fact: Since the first quarter of 2020, US households have added $50 trillion in wealth.

Can we expect US performance versus the world to continue? That’s a big question for investors.

2) Oh yeah, and the S&P500 hit a new all-time-high in the past week.

It’s up around 22-23% for the year.

Normally when the stock market is having a strong year, it tends to follow through in the last quarter.

That’s what the chart below shows.

S&P500 at 6,000 is coming my friends 💲 💲 

3)  BTC is finally showing signs of life after months of doing nothing, except for a lot of chop.

It’s up almost 10% for the week.

According to Bloomberg, until this week BTC had moved less than 5% for 34 straight sessions - the longest streak of calm in a year.

When moon??

4) Q3 earnings season started this week. And yeah, companies are doing fine.

Some flavor:

5) Elon Musk had a big weekend, with the Starship-Mechazilla landing and the Tesla Robotaxi launch event.

In the lead-up, many traders were anticipating a surge in Tesla’s stock price.

Even Goldman Sachs was pushing Tesla options as a buy.

Goldman recommends buying Tesla call options before two big catalysts in October

This options trade could make a profit if Tesla's robotaxi event next month gives the stock a boost.

Instead the stock is (-8%) since last Friday 🫠 

Punk'd 🤣 

charts

How does this bull market’s performance measure up to past ones?

It’s currently up around 60% after 500 days (the red line in the graph below).

That’s somewhere in the upper middle range of past bull markets going back to the 1960s.

How much room is left to run? Nobody knows and nobody can tell.

But so far what’s happening is not out of the ordinary.

US household’s equity allocation is reaching historically high levels.

People are bulled up, signs of near term top?

And finally, some parting wisdom

thanks for reading and have a great weekend,

Al Atencio 🦉 

Don’t to forget to share the young investor with your friends…

To receive the next article directly in your inbox, subscribe below 👇🦉