Last November, Pfizer announced a 95 percent efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine. Since that time, there has been a notable shift in leadership within the stock market.
New Leadership and The Vaccine Pivot
The Taming of the Flu
This week, “all the world’s a stage,” especially for William Shakespeare, the second person to be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine in the UK. In the U.S., an outside panel of independent experts recommended Pfizer’s vaccine approval for emergency authorization. And as indicated this morning, FDA emergency use authorization approval should come shortly.
The Best and Worst of Times
The blight of COVID-19 resulted in unfortunate milestones this week – record hospitalizations, ICU stays and most sobering, a single-day high in fatalities from the infection here in the U.S.
A Vaccination Rotation
2020 has been such a challenging year for so many, so on this Thanksgiving weekend we offer our thanks to all the healthcare workers who have provided comfort to so many amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also thankful for all the researchers and volunteers who appear to have us at the doorstep of widely available vaccines with the corresponding hope for a return to normalcy. True to form, financial markets have already begun anticipating what a post-vaccine world will look like and asset prices have responded accordingly.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
On the back of the strongest election week returns since 1932, markets rallied sharply to begin this week as Pfizer announced 90 percent efficacy on a COVID-19 vaccine. Even more, the industries performing best were those most sensitive to economic momentum, instead of the “stay-at-home” trade that has dominated the market for the majority of the year with Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google accounting for around 80 percent of the S&P 500 return.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Economic data the past week reinforced the view that the U.S. economy continues to improve. This was highlighted by the retail sales number released by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Thursday morning.