It looks like stocks and bonds are taking another wild Covid ride today–stocks way down with yields tumbling by 5-6 basis points.
So we go from Friday being wild down, Monday a ride up and now Tuesday back down.
It is all kind of silly–but markets have been kind of silly and artificial for a few years and there is no reason for anything to change now.
Add the Powell and Yellen show before congress today to the Covid variant and you have the ingredients to send markets into a panic. Oh well–these moves have really been just noise–we remain just a few percent off of record highs in the various indexes.
It really continues to be a ‘wait and watch’ situation–we need to have the Covid situation shake out a bit since this is the market mover right now–could be a couple weeks. On the other hand if you are an immediate income person maybe you finds issues that are now giving you a pretty tasty current yield compared to a few months ago since even mid quality higher coupon issues (6-7%) are off a number of percent from their highs in August.
This was also a year for new issue closed end funds. Most of them are tanking heavily and are down 10-20%. True they are 6-8% below NAV but it shows the selling pressure!!
Pretty standard stuff…..someone crapped in China….everybody panicked.
Tim.. this is every year selling to pay taxes or re-buy lower in Dec.