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“The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.” – Marshal McLuhan
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Given all the drama coming out of DC, you can’t be faulted for forgetting there’s an employment report today, but that is probably what should receive the most focus this morning from the markets. Whether it does is another story altogether. Heading into the report, US equity futures have bounced from Thursday’s close as they look to erase much of yesterday’s losses. European stocks are pretty much unchanged, while Asian equities were mixed with modest gains and losses. In the Treasury market, yields are little changed, as is the case with crude oil, even as gold, silver, and Bitcoin see modest gains.
Yesterday’s spat between Elon Musk and President Trump sucked all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to news and overshadowed every other major geo-political event that the market had been focused on heading into the day. The argument also sucked a lot of the market cap from Tesla (TSLA) stock as it fell more than 14% for its third double-digit percentage decline this year! While the declines have been painful, TSLA has also experienced two double-digit percentage rallies this year, including a 22.7% gain on 4/9, which was its largest one-day gain since May 2013. In other words, the stock has been volatile, even by the standards of TSLA.
Yesterday, on an intraday basis, TSLA plunged 11.7%, which was just the 14th time since its IPO in 2010 that the stock declined by double-digit percentages from the open to close and the second time this year. We’d also note that the 21.1% rally from the open to close on 4/9 was the stock’s second-largest open-to-close rally in its history.
While TSLA has been volatile, it hasn’t made a lot of headway. With the stock closing yesterday at $284.70, it was 3 cents–yes, CENTS–higher than where it opened after Election Day last November. There have been some major moves within those six months, but for all the talk about how Musk’s support of Trump was just a sinister ploy to buy influence and enrich himself, the stock’s performance says otherwise. While the stock hasn’t done much since the election, over the last year, shares have rallied just under 60%, which is nearly six times the 11% gain of the S&P 500.
YTD performance within the mega-cap tech space looks like a pack of FruitStripe gum. At the top of the performance list, Meta Platforms (META), Broadcom (AVGO), and Microsoft (MSFT) have all experienced double-digit percentage gains this year, while TSLA, Apple (AAPL), and Alphabet (GOOGL) have seen double-digit percentage declines. In between, Nvidia (NVDA) and Amazon.com (AMZN) have modest gains or losses.
From a shorter-term perspective, the disparities are nearly as wide. While AAPL and TSLA are both modestly below their 50-DMAs, AVGO headed into last night’s earnings report nearly 30% above its 50-DMA while NVDA, META, and MSFT were all at least 10% above that level. While often thought of as a monolith with the stock market, when it comes to performance, mega-cap tech has been in as much unison as political discourse at a holiday dinner.
