Market Coverage: Wednesday December 9th Yahoo Finance

Stocks hit record highs Wednesday morning as lawmakers appeared to draw closer to an agreement for another round of virus-relief measures.

The Dow rose more than 100 points, or 0.4%, and those on the S&P 500 gained 0.2% just after market open. Both touched record intraday levels. The Nasdaq briefly rose before dipping slightly below the flat line.

More upbeat developments on a stimulus package helped alleviate concerns over economic fallout that might emerge as COVID-19 cases surge and trigger more lockdowns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement on Twitter that he offered a new $916 billion proposal to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), which he said “includes money for state and local governments and robust liability protections for businesses, schools and universities.” Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers had unveiled a stimulus outline worth about $908 billion.

And earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday suggested that lawmakers would be remiss to depart Washington later this month without advancing another package of virus relief funds.

“I think it’s the view shared by literally everybody on both sides of the aisle, that we can’t leave without doing a COVID bill,” McConnell said during a news conference on Tuesday. “The country needs it.”

Meanwhile,Pfizer (PFE) and BioNTech’s (BNTX) COVID-19 vaccine inched closer to approval. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released data from the companies’ clinical trials on Tuesday, which reaffirmed that the inoculation was effective within approximately 10 days of the first dose, and offered strong protection regardless of a volunteer’s age, weight or race. The FDA is set to convene its panel of outside advisers Thursday, with the group set to vote on whether or not to recommend approval of the vaccine for emergency use authorization shortly thereafter.

Though traders are still awaiting final confirmation that another stimulus package will get done and a vaccine roll-out will go smoothly, many have begun anxiously looking for another catalyst for markets.

“The market is gasping and grasping for some new leadership signal. Vaccines, virus, stimulus, spending are all rather well priced into the market. People have different expectations, but they’re pretty much there as knowns in the marketplace,” George Ball, Sanders Morris Harris CEO, told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday. “I think the next move, especially if you’re a trader, is probably greed. And there’s a greed catalyst out there that I think is very influential.”

Three other factors could push the markets higher as well, he added.

“One is that there’s going to be a good deal of spending, and it’s likely to be in infrastructure first before anything else, but that’s going to be a major economic stimulus for the markets,” he said. “The second factor that isn’t there yet is an intangible, and it is the evidence that President-elect Biden is using unification as his primary theme. Unification is good for psychology.”

“And the third is that people, and particularly the younger ‘do-it-yourselfers,’ the Robinhood traders, are discovering individual equities as a place of interest. Part of it is speculative, part of it is interest, and they’re a bigger and bigger factor in the market and tend to be on the bull side as opposed to the contrary.”

Looking ahead to later this week, traders on Wednesday will see the first of two highly valued companies hit the public exchanges. Shares of food delivery company DoorDash are set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in the morning, after pricing its initial public offering at $102 per share – above its previously advertised range – to raise nearly $3.4 billion.

Home-sharing software company Airbnb is set to price its initial public offering on Wednesday, and shares will begin trading publicly on the Nasdaq on Thursday.
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