(Bloomberg) -- Turkeys are being deep fried and Christmas trees going up -- and so are stocks. Wall Street pros, for whom the holiday season usually bequeaths a breather, are expecting no such thing in 2020’s version of Thanksgiving.
“Yeah, it’s business as usual,” Jonathan Boyar, managing director at Boyar Value Group, said from his set-up in the suburbs of New York. “I am home the same way as I have been home since March,” he added, noting that he’s only “taking off Thursday and back to work on Friday.”
Historically, volume thins out around the November holiday. On Monday, a cool 12 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges -- up more than 10% from last week’s average -- as news broke of President-elect Joe Biden picking a Treasury secretary while investors coped with another fierce rotation into cruise lines and energy producers.
On Tuesday, upon hearing that the formal presidential transition is taking place and more encouraging signs on a coronavirus vaccine, the Dow hit 30,000 for the first time.
Thanksgiving week was one of Scott Bauer’s favorite times when he was a rookie at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Fewer of his co-workers tended to be in, and low volume often created opportunities for the nimble. Not this year.
Bauer, a 30-year veteran of the trading floor who is now chief executive officer at Prosper Trading Academy, will be working from his home office near Chicago, where he has six monitors arranged in a miniature makeshift trading pit. Like so many others, he’s been working from home since the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, blurring the distinction between this and any other week.
“It’s going to be markets as usual, and I think we’re going to see a very, very busy week. Just because it’s Thanksgiving week doesn’t mean that any of the risk headlines have gone away,” Bauer said from his home trading floor. “There’s a ton of opportunity in this market, so why miss out on it?”
Joseph Saluzzi, partner and co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading LLC in Chatham, New Jersey, noted that too much is going on to expect a peaceful break.
“All of a sudden something breaks, you’re like, ‘OK, change of plans, I’m back on my computer,’” Saluzzi said. “There will be more on-call types of trading situations, where they could be there if they need to be there. But there’s probably still people planning on taking a couple of days just to relax and stay with family a little bit more -- if they haven’t had enough of that already.”
Shawn Snyder, head of investment strategy at Citi Personal Wealth Management, thought he’d get a breather by now.
“It hasn’t really slowed down at all,” Snyder said. “And part of it is that everyone has kind of different lifestyles and when you don’t have the structure of the work office, it stretches from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.”
