• Omicron variant from Southern African nations causes great concern.
• Stay-at-home trades roar back with potential travel restrictions but widespread lockdowns unlikely.
• Travel and leisure stocks plummet: airlines and hotels.

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Just when you were having an enjoyable four day weekend cruising along the interminable bull market COVID is back disrupting trends. Traders who were working on Black Friday in thin trading could have made huge profits with the early COVID trades like vaccines, BioNtech (BNTX) and Moderna (MRNA), as well as many COVID diagnostics stocks. Healthcare stocks held up reasonably well .Will there be new respect for biotech and healthcare stocks? IBB is up for the week (IBB).

Given the tumult here is a brief scoreboard:

• Bond yields plunged,10 year down 9.9% to 1.482%.
• For the week all down S&P at 4594 2.2%, DJI at 34,8999 2%, Nasdaq at 15,491  3.5%.
• Lagging Russell 2000 stalled again over one month but up 13.73% YTD. at 2246.
• Most indices show a loss of November gains,
• For the week: IBB up 0.79% up 2.25% YTD, XLV down 1.35% up 16.33% YTD XBI down 4.45%, down 17%YTD

Over the next week we will update you on rollicking market trends and potential impacts on the economy just as  peak shopping days lie ahead. We will update especially vaccine and COVID diagnostic stocks. Given that healthcare is a defensive group amidst market volatility we assume that large cap biopharma remains an attractive hold. For now metrics don’t matter as much as technicals. It may take a week or two for better data and scientific assessment of how our current vaccines protect from the omicron variant.