Judging from the close of Monday’s trading session, there looks to be enough fuel for a Santa Claus rally to end 2021.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 closed up 1.38% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.98%. The NASDAQ Composite was ahead by 1.39% and the small cap Russell 2000 was higher by 0.89%.
If you’ll remember the Santa Claus rally takes place most years during the last 5 trading days of the old year and the first two trading days of the new. According to the Stock Trader’s Almanac the rally has been good for a gain of 1.3% on average since 1950. (It also leads into the January Barometer, discovered by Yale Hirsch in 1972. The barometer says as January goes so goes the rest of the year–and that’s been true 85.7% of the time since 1950.)
A Santa rally this year would be riding on the back of the Omicron Variant news trend, which for today at least is coming down on the side of the variant being less likely to result in hospitalizations and on news from places like Denmark and South Africa that the outbreak is already starting to peak.
What this actually means for global and domestic economic growth–reports of thousands of cancelled flights because airlines don’t have enough healthy personnel to crew them can’t be called a good sign–in the longer run is still a very open question.
But in the low volume days at the end of the year, it looks like the short-term news might be all that an end of the year rally needs.
In market action as of 1:20 in New York some of the biggest gains are coming in the usual suspects. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was up 5.62%. Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) added 2.72% and 2.30%, respectively. Nvidia (NVDA) was ahead 4.40%. Synaptics (SYNA) gained 5.10%. Applied Materials (AMAT) tacked on 4.65%. Marvell Technology (MRVL) rose 3.57%.
Interest in meme stocks was mixed with AMC Entertainment (AMC) for example, up 0.63% but GameStop (GME) down 2.52%.
