“In investing, it’s easy to achieve performance that is equal to that of the average investor or a market benchmark. Since it’s easy to be average, real investment success must consist of outperforming other investors and the averages. Investment success is largely a relative concept, measured on the basis of relative performance. Simply being right about a coming event isn’t enough to ensure superior relative performance if everyone holds the same view and as a result everyone is equally right. Thus success doesn’t lie in being right, but rather in being more right than others. Similarly, one doesn’t have to be right in order to be successful: just less wrong than others. Success doesn’t come from having a correct forecast, but from having a superior forecast. Can such forecasts be obtained?” ― Howard Marks

1. CDC Announces Vaccinated Americans Can Socialize Without Masks — People who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can socialize in small groups without wearing masks or social distancing, the CDC said Monday. They can also visit unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for the disease without masking.
Vaccinated adults should still keep their distance, wear masks and take other precautions in public, however, since less than 10% of Americans have been fully vaccinated to date. With new infections falling more slowly over the past few weeks and more dangerous variants taking hold, worries are rising over a resurgence just as young, mostly unvaccinated people are set to head to spring break hot spots in places like Florida, which has never had a statewide mask mandate.
2. A Likely Consumer Spending Boom with a Bigger Stimulus Checks & Reopenings — The third round of stimulus more directly targets lower earners, who are also more likely to spend their checks than others. Considering that consumer spending rose 2.4% in January after checks were issued, the larger, $1,400 checks could increase spending even more.
A rise in personal income, paired with more reopenings, could “unleash substantial pent-up demand” in service sector consumption, Jefferies chief economist Aneta Markowska said. She expects personal consumption spending to rise 7% in 2021 and 4.1% in 2022. However, a third of respondents said they planned to save more of their third stimulus check, with just 5% saying they planned to use it for a vacation or trip.
3. GE Announced Plans for an 8-for-1 Reverse Stock Split — company’s shares outstanding to roughly 1.1 billion from almost 9 billion, resulting in a stock price of about $112 a share, from $14. A scan of GE’s peers shows stock prices roughly between $100 and $200 a share and share counts in the hundreds of millions. GE also sold its jet-leasing business to AerCap and financial forecasts for 2021.
4. Biden to Sign Third Stimulus Package Into Law Friday, With Checks Following Soon — The House approved the bill Wednesday by a vote of 220-211, with all but one Democrat, Maine’s Jared Golden, supporting the bill and all Republicans opposing it. The $1,400 stimulus checks will start arriving this month and will not include Biden’s signature. The bill also extends supplemental federal unemployment benefits and provides $350 billion in aid to state and local governments. A proposed increase in the federal minimum wage didn’t make it into the final bill. Biden also said Wednesday that the U.S. plans to buy 100 million more doses of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine and that it will share any surplus with the rest of the world. The U.S. is also giving $4 billion to an international program aimed at vaccinating the poorest countries.
5. Moderna Tests Booster Aimed at South African Variant on First Human — Moderna has started giving booster doses using a formula aimed specifically at targeting a coronavirus variant first found in South Africa. The variant appears to be 50% more contagious than earlier forms of the virus and Moderna has said its current vaccine is six times less effective at neutralizing it.
Pfizer, whose vaccine was shown to be two-thirds less potent against the same strain in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February, is studying the effectiveness of giving patients a third dose of its existing vaccine. A study released this week found the Pfizer vaccine was highly effective against a strain first found in Brazil. The Food and Drug Administration recently revised its rules to let pharmaceutical companies run smaller trials to shorten the time for modified vaccines to get authorized for widespread use, which could shave months off the approval process.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com: