Markets Turn Deep Red As Increased Pandemic Fears/Growth Concerns Take Hold

It was a sea of deep red throughout today’s market session. The markets were caught in the spiraling grasp of increased uncertainties in the world. It was enough to turn the best of us towards the nearest cocktail to calm our collective nerves. These uncertainties included the increasing reported numbers surrounding the pandemic and staged riots out of Italy & France & Germany’s move to once again lock down, the chaos around the presidential elections, key market participants putting up less than stellar quarterly numbers and guidance or even the lack of guidance in some cases, no reasonable stimulus package in view, & the current markets overly negative perception of it all.

Today’s selloff has now brought us back down by a little over 9% from the markets top. So is this the normal 10% market correction that many of us look for where we now get a bounce to or turn towards the positive side of the coin or are we seeing something else? Good question, I wish I had the answer, but what is certain is fear of it all is certainly set in for many and something will need to change it. It might just be time to let it simmer. By the way, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Comcast, Starbucks, and a host of other notables report tomorrow so this could be an interesting day and may help to turn the corner or not. 

At the end of the day, the S&P 500 closed at 3,271.03 (-3.53%), the Dow 30 closed at 26,519.95 (-3.43%) as tech component Microsoft (MSFT) closed at $202.68/share, -5.0% as the company guided revenue down below the consensus for its fiscal Q2. The tech heavy Nasdaq closed at 11,004.87 (-3.73%) as large tech stocks moved higher. The information technology sector dropped 4.3% leading all sectors in this overall negative day where all 11 sectors finished in the red significantly. The FAANG stocks ended moved lower  as follows: Alphabet (GOOG) $1,516.62/share, -5.46%, Facebook (FB) $267.67/share, -5.51%, Apple (AAPL) closed at $111.20/share, -4.63%, Amazon (AMZN) closed at $3,162.78/share, -3.76%, & Netflix (NFLX) closed at $486.24/share down -.55%.  The Russell 2000 ended at 1,543.28 (-2.97%) today.  

EV manufacturer Tesla (TSLA) closed at $406.02/share down 4.39% & Chinese EV concern NIO Limited, (NIO) closed at $27.51/share down 3.27%. 

Precious metals also fell today. Gold closed at $1,878(-27) while silver closed at $23.46/oz (-.91). North American silver and gold producer Hecla Mining Company (HL) closed at $4.68/share. HL’s 52-week range is $1.40 – $6.79. Barrick Gold Corporation (GOLD) closed at $25.92/share down 4.32%. 

Oil prices moved lower closing at $37.45/bbl down sharply by 5.3% as the pandemic and growth concerns weighed in again. Chevron (CVX) closed at $66.88/share down 3.78%. Chevron announced their quarterly dividend  today of $1.29/share payable Dec. 10, 2020 for those on record Nov. 18, 2020.

The 2-yr US treasury yield closed even at .15% while the 10-yr yield remained at .78%. The U.S. Dollar Index strengthened closing at 93.46. 

On a positive note, there were a few stocks that actually rose substantially today. Here are a few: First Solar (FSLR) ($93.31, +13.25%), Rolls-Royce Holdings (RECEF) ($1.13, +12.97%), CorLogic (CLGX) ($76.23, +11.69%), Equitable Holdings (EQH) ($20.17, +9.03%), Fiverr (FVRR) ($160.08, +7.73%), & General Electric (GE) ($7.42, +4.51%).

TOMORROW

Tomorrow’s macroeconomic calendar will deliver the advance estimate for Q3 GDP, the weekly Initial and Continuing Claims report, & the Pending Home Sales report for September.

WATCH LIST

• Atossa Therapeutics (NASDAQ: ATOS) closed at $1.57/share down -1.87% on the day.  
  • Atossa Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATOS), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company seeking to discover and develop innovative medicines in areas of significant unmet medical need with a current focus on breast cancer and COVID-19, recently announced it has now completed enrollment in its Phase 1 clinical study using Atossa’s proprietary drug candidate AT-301 administered by nasal spray. “Completing enrollment is a significant milestone and comes at a time when we are seeing a new wave if infections in certain geographies and an increased focus on developing therapies to treat COVID-19,” commented Steven Quay, M.D., Ph.D., Atossa’s President and CEO. “While the virus presents significant danger overall, the vast majority of people testing positive for COVID-19 do not require hospitalization and instead quarantine at home while they manage their symptoms and attempt not to infect those around them. As there are no currently FDA-approved treatments to help these patients, we are developing AT-301 for at home use so that they can recover faster.”

• Fate Therapeutics, Inc. (FATE) closed at $45.03/share -5.12% today. 

  • Fate is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of programmed cellular immunotherapies for cancer and immune disorders.

  • On October 15th, FATE announced that five abstracts for the Company’s induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) product platform were accepted for presentation at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) annual meeting being held virtually from November 9-14, 2020. Learn more. 

• Shares of NeuBase Therapeutics (NBSE) closed at $8.37/share -2.90% after recently reaching a new 52-week high recently of $11.78/share.
  • NeuBase is developing the next generation of gene silencing therapies with its flexible, highly specific synthetic antisense oligonucleotides. The proprietary NeuBase peptide-nucleic acid (PNA) antisense oligonucleotide (PATrOL™) platform allows for the rapid development of targeted drugs, increasing the treatment opportunities for the hundreds of millions of people affected by rare genetic diseases, including those that can only be treated through accessing of secondary RNA structures. Using PATrOL technology, NeuBase aims to first tackle rare, genetic neurological disorders. NeuBase is continuing its progress towards developing treatment candidates in Huntington’s Disease (HD) and Myotonic Dystrophy (DM1.)
  • RBC Capital Markets recently initiated coverage of NBSE with an Outperform, Speculative Risk rating & a $16 price target. 

• Shares of INVO Bioscience (INVO) closed at $3.75/share.
  • INVO is a medical device company focused on creating alternative treatments for patients diagnosed with infertility and developers of INVOcell®, the world’s only in vivo Intravaginal Culture System. Industry forecasts suggest that only 1% to 2% of the estimated 150 million infertile couples worldwide are currently being treated. INVO’s mission is to increase access to care and expand infertility treatment across the globe with a goal of improving patient affordability and industry capacity. Since January 2019, INVO Bioscience has signed commercialization agreements in the United States, India, as well as parts of Africa and Eurasia and Mexico for the INVOcell device.
  • INVO recently announced that it has teamed up with Dr. Francisco Arredondo, MD, a respected and experienced board certified reproductive endocrinologist, and Dr. Ramiro Ramirez, MD, a physician and owner of several successful enterprises in Mexico, to establish a joint venture through its wholly-owned subsidiary INVO Centers, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“INVO Centers”), focusing on developing the Mexico market for INVOcell. The new jointly-owned operation, named Positib Fertility, S.A. de C.V. (“Positib Fertility”), is a Mexico registered company that will focus on establishing fertility centers dedicated to offering INVOcell, with the initial center to be located in the city of Monterrey, Mexico.

Economic Reports

• On Monday we received the US new home sales report which confirmed a drop to 959k in September representing a 3.5% month/month drop.

Investing & Inspiration

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” – Warren Buffett

“Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply…and they can’t predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack.” – Peter Lynch

“Investing puts money to work. The only reason to save money is to invest it.” – Grant Cardone

“You cannot save time for your future use however you can invest time for your future.” – John F. Heerdink, Jr. 

“Know what you own, and know why you own it.” – Peter Lynch

“Liquidity is only there when you don’t need it.” -Old Proverb

“If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.” – Richard Branson

“Fear incites human action far more urgently than does the impressive weight of historical evidence.” – Jeremy Siegel

“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” – Robert Arnott

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.” – Charlie Munger

“The entrance strategy is actually more important than the exit strategy.” – Edward Lampert

“The rivers don’t drink their own water; Trees don’t eat their own fruits. The sun does not shine for itself, And flowers do not spread their fragrance For themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature” – Pope Francis

“It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different from the majority.” – John Templeton

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin.

“I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!” -Bill Gates

“Every portfolio benefits from bonds; they provide a cushion when the stock market hits a rough patch. But avoiding stocks completely could mean your investment won’t grow any faster than the rate of inflation.” – Suze Orman

“The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility, and flow of risk capital… the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.” – John F. Kennedy

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion. -George Bernard Shaw

“There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.”-Ed Seykota

“Let this scenario play out on its own, in its own fashion. As you watch it unfold, you will soon be grateful that you choose the peaceful path. Remember — those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

“As long as you enjoy investing, you’ll be willing to do the homework and stay in the game.” -Jim Cramer

“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” -Mark Cuban

“Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.” -Bruce Kovner

“The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.” -Jawaharlal Nehru

“The only true test of whether a stock is “cheap” or “high” is not its current price in relation to some former price, no matter how accustomed we may have become to that former price, but whether the company’s fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.” -Philip Fisher

“I learned to avoid trying to catch up or double up to recoup losses. I also learned that a certain amount of loss will affect your judgment, so you have to put some time between that loss and the next trade.” -Richard Dennis

“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘this time it’s different.” -Sir John Templeton

“Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger