Stimulus Stalemate Sparks Slump In Stocks, Bonds, Oil, & The Dollar Tyler Durden Fri, 10/23/2020 - 16:00 Day after day the algos excited pumped and dumped stocks on the back of 'hope' and 'nope' headlines about the next round of COVID-19 relief from Washington. By the end of the week, stocks were down, bond (prices) were down, oil was down, the dollar was down, and economic data was down... Source: Bloomberg But all stocks care about is their next "feed" of free money... Source: Bloomberg But apart from that everything is awesome... Small Caps and Trannies managed gains on the week, Nasdaq underperformed... Big round-trip in VIX this week but remained higher on the week... FANG stocks fell for the second week in a row... Source: Bloomberg And semis chipwrecked for a second week... Source: Bloomberg Interestingly, defensives and cyclicals tracked each other all week as everything was top-down stimulus-on/stimulus-off swings... Source: Bloomberg Significant weakness in momo stocks this week... Source: Bloomberg "Most Shorted" stocks were squeezed Thursday and Friday back to unch on the week... Source: Bloomberg In fact, as yields rose on the week (rallying back lower somewhat today)... Source: Bloomberg Pushing yields to their highest since early June... Source: Bloomberg The curve rose to its steepest since July 2017... Source: Bloomberg Real Yields rose notably on the week but as the chart shows, gold decoupled... Source: Bloomberg The dollar extended its decline (down for the 3rd week in the last 4)... Source: Bloomberg On the bright side, BANKS were bid as the yield curve steepened... Source: Bloomberg And BITCOIN soared back above $13,000... Source: Bloomberg Gold futures ended the week very slightly higher, managing to hold above $1900... Oil prices tumbled on the week, with WTI futs closing below $40... Finally, this is what the 'experts' are panicking about?!! Source: Bloomberg And if some more context for this terrifying killer pandemic is also required... Covid deaths in context pic.twitter.com/ZxeQVZtmw0 — zerohedge (@zerohedge) https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1319656369398665222?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");