This year's memorial day would be a stark contrast to 2020's gloomy and uncertain memorial day. Thanks to extraordinary success of vaccination drive, America is back in action celebrating Memorial Day remembering ones who lost their lives protecting Americans, travel, barbecues and start of summer season (including summer movies). This memorial day weekend has special meaning as it can also be marked as start of post-covid America. Nearly 2 million Americans would be flying this weekend. Couple of much awaited movies (A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella) would revive theatre going experience and cinema theatre companies like AMC (more on this later).
This weekend also marks centenary of one of the most unfortunate events in American History which not many people know. 100 years back White supremacists massacred and destroyed Geenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma which was also called Black Wall Street (I came to know about this when I was watching "Watchmen" series on HBO). Last week on May 25, one year anniversary of George Floyd Murder reminded us that even after 100 years of Tulsa Massacre, collectively American Society has much more work to do to address racism. On this memorial day, let's take a collective pledge about #nomoreracism.
Last week also marked an interesting revival of "meme" and "Wood" stocks. Let's explore what it means for upcoming months...
What's "meme" - a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users. in January, Bernie Sanders' mitten image during Biden Inauguration was passed around millions of times. That was "meme". In stock markets, few stocks like GME and AMC were widely discussed on Reddit forums which caused multi-fold rise in their stock prices (delinked from fundamentals of companies). These stocks became "meme" stocks. After Jan hoopla, these stocks cooled down but at much higher valuations than fundamentals would support. These stocks - especially AMC came to life again last week in which it more than doubled. It also pulled up other meme stocks like GME, KOSS and others. If you had read my blog about "Back to normal. What would you do?" and love going to movies, you would have bought AMC and would be very happy. I can say that my AMC holdings were more than sufficient to pay for lifetime of movies in theaters!
Let's talk about "Wood" stocks - these are the holdings of Cathy Wood's ETF - ARKK ETF was one of the best performing ETF of 2020 with over 100% return. However in 2021 it has been having difficult year (down to 112 from high of 160). After dipping below 100 2 weeks back, it has found its footing and recovered over 12% in 2 weeks thanks to her concentrated positions in TSLA, PLTR, COIN and many high-flying "innovation" growth stocks.
Overall markets are inching towards all time highs - so much for "Sell in May and Walk Away" saying. So what's in store for summer? There are multiple catalysts which would keep the party going at least till Aug/Sept.
- Economy is really opening up - Good luck getting hotel and restaurant reservations of your choice. Americans are out in force and want to spend money.
- Inflation expectations are going up but not out of control for Fed to change its stance on interest rates
- Unemployment is coming down...from personal experience, hiring qualified candidates in Silicon Valley is very difficult. This is true even for non-tech positions
- Biden is rolling out big infrastructure spending plan which is good for economy
- Innovation engine in areas like EV, AI, Autonomous driving, Fintech, Pharma and Biotechs, Healthcare/Telemedicine, Green energy, Cloud, SAAS seem to be gathering momentum
- Interest rates are historically very low propelling double digit gains in housing
- Wealth Effect due to gains in housing and stock market gains making people more confident about their financial position (opposite of what happened during financial crisis)
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