From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
JOBS POP
The labor market had its biggest monthly gain since last August, with employers adding 916,000 jobs in March, far above the 675,000 consensus estimate. The unemployment rate fell to an even 6 percent from 6.2 percent in February. The hospitality and construction sectors led the recovery as more leisure-based businesses open and the housing market continues to run hot. With U.S. markets closed for Good Friday, investors will have a long weekend to digest the upside surprise and think about whether it’s an aberration or a sign of things to come as the pandemic begins to recede and the stimulus spending hits the economy’s circulatory system. At the end of a shortened week that closed out Q1, the S&P 500 closed above 4,000 for the first time, led once again by tech stocks. President Biden’s announcement that he plans to pay for his infrastructure plan by raising corporate taxes has not put a dent in the rally on Wall St. — at least not yet.
GAMESTOP'S NEW EXECS
GameStop continued its big-name hiring spree, poaching another Amazon exec to help guide its e-commerce transition. Elliott Wilke joins the video game retailer as its chief growth officer, where he will be tasked with expanding customer loyalty programs and consumer insights. Wilke was previously running Amazon’s Prime Pantry business and had come up at P&G before that. GameStop also raided Chewy for another pair of execs to head marketing and brand development. (Chewy, for its part, got a nice pop after a big earnings beat this week. That stock got hammered in the broader tech selloff a month ago but has been recovering ever since.) GameStop investors have been liking what they’re seeing since Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen has started putting his imprimatur on the company, with the stock maintaining more than half the gains notched during the Reddit-fueled trading frenzy of two months ago.
PFIZER'S GOOD WEEK
Pfizer said this week that its COVID vaccine is still highly effective after six months, even against some of the more worrying variants of the virus, and also 100 percent effective in the first trials in adolescents. And yet…the stock ended the week more or less unchanged. Pfizer shares are only up about 5 percent since last January, despite the company in that time period completing one of the greatest engineering and logistical successes in the history of business. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla noted as much on the company’s last earnings call, saying Pfizer "clearly deserves a much, much higher multiple in this industry." And empirically speaking, he’s not wrong. Pfizer’s trading at a forward earnings multiple of about 11.4, compared to 22 for the broader S&P.
VIRGIN GALACTIC'S SHINY SPACECRAFT
Virgin Galactic unveiled its second spacecraft, a shiny silver vehicle dubbed the VSS Imagine. The Imagine is the first in a new generation of spaceships that Virgin plans to use to ferry civilians into suborbital space as early as next year. The Imagine "lay[s] the foundation for the design and manufacture of future vehicles," the company said. Shares of $SPCE rose on the news after coming through a brutal March that saw the stock fall close to 20 percent when a prominent investor sold down his stake.
ARCHEGOS MESS
The implosion of Archegos Capital Management led to extreme volatility in shares of ViacomCBS, of which the hedge fund had built a large, highly-leveraged stake. Archegos got caught in a margin call after its big bet started to unravel late last week. That colossal position in the media conglomerate helped make it the best performing stock in the S&P this year. Then a routine share issuance by Viacom to raise $3 billion led to the margin call that torpedoed Archegos, taking shares of Viacom down with it and knocking off half the company’s valuation.
