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“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.” – Rod Serling

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

The bulls may have enjoyed a little too much eggnog yesterday. US equity futures are firmly lower across the board indicating declines of 0.3%.  Treasury yields, gold, and crude oil are all fractionally higher while Bitcoin is under the most selling pressure with a decline of 4% as its attempt to bounce back above $100 fails for now.

The only economic report on the calendar this morning was jobless claims. Initial claims came in modestly lower than expected, but continuing claims were higher than expected and bounced back above 1.9 million.

As we noted on Tuesday, the S&P 500’s 1.10% gain was the best Christmas Eve performance for the index since 1974. The Nasdaq’s 1.35% rally was the second-best gain on the last trading day before Christmas and the third time it rallied more than 1%. As shown in the table below, in 2000 the Nasdaq rallied over 7% on the last trading day before Christmas. However, that came well after the dot-com peak when the index was in a stupid phase of volatility that the drawn-out election results only exacerbated. The only other year the Nasdaq gained more than 1% on the last trading day before Christmas was in 1991.  Overall, there have been nine years that the Nasdaq rallied more than 0.75% on the last trading day before Christmas. In those years, the median rest-of-year gain from Christmas through year-end was 1.6% with positive returns five out of eight times.