Ending On A Down Note

It’s red all over the screen this morning as equity futures, treasury yields, cryptocurrencies, and commodities are all lower.  The only thing higher it seems is COVID case counts.  Market sentiment certainly doesn’t feel jolly as Christmas is barely a week away.  One positive trend worth noting, however, is that South Africa is reporting that the hospitalization rate for the latest Omicron wave of COVID has been much less than at the same point in the Delta wave, so hopefully, that’s a trend that continues over there and here in the US as the variant takes hold.

Image Source: Pixabay

The Nasdaq and Consumer Staples have followed divergent paths over the last month with the Nasdaq down close to 5% while Consumer Staples has rallied nearly 5%.  With a performance spread of nearly 10 percentage points between the two, the gap is the widest in the Consumer Staples sector’s favor that it has been in since March of this year, and besides that, the only other times in the last ten years that the spread got this wide was in August 2011, October 2018, and March 2020.