Monday was one of those days when the indexes looked rather dull, but under the surface, there was some great trading.
Breadth was very good, with breadth of 5,300 gainers to 2,800 decliners. There were around 730 stocks hitting new 12-month highs, and the Russell 2000 exchange-traded fund (IWM) jumped almost 1% but isn't back yet to the highs it hit in July.
Tesla (TSLA) was the star of the show as it gained around 13% and reached a $1 trillion market cap. Morgan Stanley set a $1,200 target on the stock, and it also announced that Hertz (HTZZ) bought 100,000 cars.
After a couple of days of rest, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies jumped again and drove some hot trading action in the crypto mining sector. Special purpose acquisition companies -- SPACs -- and so-called de-SPACs attracted plenty of speculative action again, with names like Altimeter Growth Corp. (AGC) , Redwire Corp (RDW) , Bakkt Holdings (BKKT) , and Electric Last Mile Solutions Inc. (ELMS) making strong moves.
It was a day for stock picking and aggressive trading of individual stocks. Macro matters didn't matter much, and the indexes didn't really reflect what was going on.
Facebook (FB) kicked off a big week of earnings with a soft earnings report, but it announced a $50 billion buyback that pushed the stock up quite nicely. Tomorrow we have a slew of big reports hitting after the close, which will attract much attention.
The best thing about this market is that small-cap trading improved very nicely, and conditions are good for that to continue as we move into the last couple of months of the year. Now is the time to focus on good charts and solid fundamentals and not worry too much about the indexes.
