In today’s recap we talk about the North Pole moving at an alarming rate, new historic highs and riots happening in Cuba.
The U.S. S&P 500 as of last Friday was trading at nearly 22 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, way above a 5-year average of just a bit more than 18. The benchmark index has now rallied +16.73% to date in 2021.
1000’s of Cubans joined street protests from Havana to Santiago on Sunday in the biggest anti government demonstrations on the Communist-run island in decades. The protests are largely due to Cuba’s worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, its old patron, with a record surge in coronavirus infections, with citizens voicing anger over shortages of basic goods, curbs on civil liberties & the governments’ handling of the pandemic.
On Monday, the S&P 500 posted a new all-time record close of 4385, extending its gains in 2021 to +16.8%. Some investors are becoming more cautious. A highly respected valuation gauge developed by Yale economist & Nobel laureate Robert Shiller shows that the S&P 500 is now pricier than in 96% of all quarters over the past 141 years. Big-cap stocks have been this expensive only 4% of the time in the entire recorded history of equity markets.
Lumber, which was among the world’s best-performing commodities earlier this year, as the pandemic sent construction demand soaring & stoked fears of inflation, has officially wiped out all of its staggering gains for the year. At 1 point, lumber futures were trading as high as $1,733.50 per 1000 board feet, more than quadruple the level of a year earlier.
The 70-year-old founder of Virgin Galactic rode the VSS Unity into lower reaches of space Sunday morning following a 17-year journey towards suborbital space tourism. Branson believes that there is a market to carry as many as 2M people on suborbital space flights, priced in the $250K to $500K range, meaning a $1T market at the upper level. The industry can also expand, citing that there is room for some 20 space companies to take people up there.
The G20 gathering in Venice Italy was the ministers’ 1st face-to-face meeting since the start of the pandemic. An upsurge in new coronavirus variants & poor access to vaccines in many developing countries now threaten the global economic recovery, finance ministers of the world’s largest 20 economies warned over the weekend.
Unprecedented heat wave hits U.S. Pacific Northwest and western Canada; Goldman Sachs Q2 earnings beat all expectations; Singapore unveiled one of the world’s largest floating solar panel farms; Heavy rains in Germany trigger massive evacuations.
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