Last week, unemployment claims were looking good and consumers were feeling good.

The number of Americans applying for first-time unemployment benefits declined. Just 684,000 people filed claims during the week of March 20, down 97,000 from the week before, according to last week’s report from the Labor Department.

What are professional asset managers thinking? 

Bank of America recently published the results of its March global asset managers’ survey, which polls 220 professional investors responsible for about $630 billion in assets, reported Julia La Roche of Yahoo! Finance.

Investors had a lot to be enthusiastic about last week.

Major stock indices in the United States soared, finishing the week higher and setting new records along the way, reported Al Root of Barron’s. There was plenty of good news to fuel investor optimism:

Neanderthal DNA may make people more – or less – susceptible to COVID-19, reported The Economist. It all depends on whether you have the genes and, if you do, which DNA string you inherited.

Students of financial markets may have noted a historically unusual event last week.

It’s a contrarian’s dream come true.

Contrarian investors like to buck the trend. They buy when other investors are selling and sell when others are buying.

Way back, when radio disk jockeys played 45-rpm vinyl singles, the A-side of a disk was the song the record company was promoting and the other side – the flip side – held a song that sometimes had an equal or greater impact. For instance, the flip side of Queen’s We Are the Champions was We Will Rock You.

It’s not a black diamond ski run yet, but the yield curve for U.S. Treasuries is steeper than it has been in a while.

A yield curve is the line on a graph showing yields for different maturities of bonds. Yield curves provide insight to bond investors’ perceptions about the economy. There are four basic types of yield curves:

Weekly Market Commentary January 25, 2021
 

Last week, as COVID-19 vaccination efforts continued, there was speculation about stock market corrections and asset bubbles.

_{Weekly Market Commentary January 19, 2021}

Investors were rocked by economic data showing the economy hit the brakes hard in December.