New Year Kicks off with Records: Tesla, Apple, Ford & Pandemic

The new year kicked off on a very optimistic note for risky assets.

Tesla gave cause for optimism, having reported about 936K sold electric vehicles at the end of 2021. This is 87% more than in 2020. The growth rate is astounding, especially against the backdrop of the main scourge of automakers in 2021 - the lack of chips.
And although Tesla shares were quite logically and naturally growing on this news, we cannot but note that all this does not negate the fact of their strongest overvaluation.

And if the bubble in the US stock market starts to collapse, then one of the first victims will be Tesla with its sky-high prices. Although the markets ignored it, they wrote in a notebook that Tesla was recalling about 500K cars to fix something important there. And in general, if it seems to someone that Tesla is the king of growth in 2021, then here's a fact - Ford shares rose by 140% at the end of last year, which is more than the growth of Musk's shares.

And although the bubble is not going to collapse yet, there is more and more evidence of its extreme phase. Let's take at least one more record of yesterday: Apple's capitalization reached $ 3 trillion.

But not only Tesla and Apple are setting records these days. The new wave of the pandemic in volume has already exceeded two times the previous highs: 10 million new cases in seven days - this is almost double the previous weekly record of the pandemic. In Florida, for example, the number of new diseases has increased by almost 1000% in the last 2 weeks.

And do not think that a milder course of the disease means that these numbers do not mean anything. At the very least, this is fraught with a temporary shortage of labor in the world. And as a maximum - new lockdowns.

By the way, speaking of the labor force, the data on employment in the US from ADP will be published today, and on Friday we will see the official statistics on the US labor market.