The Big Picture
The pandemic continues to worsen in the US both in terms of daily cases and deaths. Reports now anticipate the peak to occur in January. Additional restrictions have been imposed this week, including the banning of indoor dining in New York and travel restrictions in the state of California. Despite these mitigation measures, the Christmas season is only expected to exacerbate the situation as people gather in any way they can. It surely feels like now would be a good time to pass that stimulus package, however speaker Pelosi is now anticipating the talks to continue over Christmas lengthening the time since they were initiated over summer.
On the data front, this weeks reports were mixed with the jobless claims surpassing 850k which corresponds to the largest week on week increase in the last 3 months. On the flipside, the Michigan University consumer sentiment index for December rose to 81.4 from 76.9 in the prior month.
The FDA advisory board voted in favour of the $PFE vaccine which has started being deployed in the UK. Next Thursday will be the time of the $MRNA vaccine. It seems that the market has already factored in the positive outcome of these emergency authorizations such that any delay to their approval could have an adverse, short-term impact.
Market Performance
The US market indices fell this week, led by the S&P500, down 1.0%, followed by the Nasdaq (-0.7%) and the Dow (-0.6%). The IPO bonanza is seen as one of the factors which caused the sell-off as fund managers rebalanced their portfolios to embellish them with popular names such as $ABNB and $DASH. The Stoxx was also lower (-1.0%) and the Italian index experienced a sharp decline (-2.2%) due political uncertainty. The Danish OMX20 finished 2.0% higher after two consecutive weeks of decline. The US Dollar was mostly unchanged relative to the Euro and gold finished flat.
Earnings
$ADBE beat earnings on Thursday after the market close and upped the 2021 guidance. While the company has seen its growth rate reducing to below 20% per year, it is still in the late teens. $LULU posted a surprised profit in Q3 and grew revenue by 21% yoy. I like them both but feel our exposure to the technology and the consumer discretionary sectors is well balanced in our portfolio at the moment.
In other corporate news, $DIS upped their projected subscriptions at the Investor Day by a factor or three which led the stock to a +15% finish for the week. $AAPL announced they are developing their own cellular modem which sent $QCOM sharply down.
Dividends
This week $NEM went ex-dividend and paid their quarterly dividend. We have one more stock of our portfolio going ex-dividend in December.
Portfolio Performance
We closed our remaining position on $GRUB this week after having halved it back in the middle of October. Overall, the investment yielded a whopping 35% profit.
Our Responsible Investor portfolio is now up 12.3% (13.2% including dividends) in 28 weeks. We are about 55% in stocks & ETFs and 45% in cash. On my watchlist this week I have $DVA, $AMWL, $LMND, $AMT, $AVGO and $ADBE.
The table below summarises the portfolio performance since inception.
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