“The superior investor is mature, rational, analytical, objective and unemotional.” ― Howard Marks

1. Covid-19 Vaccine for Kids Ages 5-11 to Be Given at Pediatric Offices, Schools Once Authorized — the Biden administration is preparing to distribute shots to children at doctors’ offices, pharmacies and schools should federal regulators clear the inoculations for kids ages 5-11. The Biden administration said it has procured enough doses to vaccinate the nation’s children and will begin shipping supplies if and when the shots are cleared for use. Officials aim to have a plan in place as soon as young children are eligible in hopes of getting as many as possible vaccinated quickly. Rates of hospitalization among children are higher than earlier in the pandemic due to the highly transmissible Delta variant, and public-health authorities plan to offer shots in settings more familiar for children than the mass sites used for many adults. Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration this month seeking emergency authorization of their vaccine.
2. Russia Orders People Not to Go to Work as Covid-19 Deaths Mount — Mr. Putin signed a decree Wednesday approving a period of nonworking days, as the government calls them, beginning Oct. 30 and stretching to Nov. 7 to encourage people to stay home and slow the spread of the virus. Regional governments where infection rates are especially virulent can speed up or prolong the measures, with employers continuing to pay their staffs as they stay home.
Latvia, which until recently had outperformed other European countries in containing the virus, on Monday announced a slate of strict measures, including a nationwide 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew and closures of schools and nonessential retail after the seven-day average of deaths in the tiny Baltic state more than doubled last week.
3. Trump-Linked SPAC Steadies Near $100 — Digital World Acquisition Corp. surge 846% as retail traders piled in after it announced a merger with Trump Media & Technology Group and the former president said he was planning a new social media platform called Truth Social. Now shares of the Donald Trump-linked special purpose acquisition company are trading at around the $100, or nearly 10 times the SPAC’s $10 debut in September.
4. Apple Now All-In on In-House M1 Chips — the new line of MacBook Pro models that Apple announced are the last of the Mac laptops to get the company’s in-house processor called the M1. That comes less than a year after the company first unveiled the chip, which replaces the Core family from Intel Corp. Apple is now selling only four models of its desktop computers that still use Intel processors. Three of those—two older iMacs and a Mac Mini—are available in newer generations with the M1 chip. The other is the Mac Pro, a workstation level beast that starts at $6,000 and actually runs on Intel’s Xeon processors that are normally used to power servers. Apple’s lack of a server-level chip might keep that machine in Intel’s camp for a while, but its nosebleed price severely limits the market.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com:

This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2021 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Weekly Summary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.