Aren’t markets friggin’ fantastic?

Last week I laid out these thoughts:

“Our playbook for the next few weeks are along these lines….US markets will be smacked for the next 1-2 weeks, USD strengthens due to the hawkish rhetoric regarding tapering, commodities pull back and the USD 3 trn stimulus bill in the US doesn’t pass. Then magically within 1-2 months, they’ll push through a stimulus 2x bigger (USD 5-6 trn), noise regarding the tapering disappears, more $ pumping and USD weakens. A simplistic viewpoint yes but that’s very simply it.”

Market Update 20/09

And then! Siam Commercial Bank decided to magically turn themselves into Soft Commercial Bank (h/t to JY & VK) – I have thoughts on this…maybe I’ll post later in the week. This led to the entire banking sector going up up up up (see the table below, it’s the only sector up this month) then the government said they’ll provide another round of stimulus in 4Q21 and then this was followed by rumours of DTAC and TRUE merging coming back to the market. But over the weekend, news regarding the flooding throughout the country came strongly into the news. So we have a wonderfully bull and bear situation going on

Bears 1) My thoughts from last week 2) Floods hurting upcountry sentiment spending 3) Delay in reopening (they’ve delayed multiple times now)

Bull 1) Weaker THB – great for exports and potential tourism recovery next year 2) Reopening theme continuing regardless of delays 3) Continued government spending combined with spending due to reopening 4) Continued improvement in earnings. 5) Amusingly…spending related to the upcountry flooding…