Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned -0.21% across the same tape.
71 desks completed all five charts.
The pandemic was supposed to have finished off the American mall for good, but the spring vaccine rollout turned retail property into the centre of the reopening trade. Even after running hard for three months, the buyers refused to give anything back.
The PC boom was long gone and smartphones had passed Intel by, so half the street thought the old titan was stuck in the past. After a winter of drifting lower, the selling simply ran out of steam.
The European debt crisis had just flared up and the May flash crash was fresh in memory, so investors were crowding into steady commercial cleaning. The spring bounce held out longer than most, but sellers were not done.
Early fears that small businesses would collapse had evaporated, replaced by a roaring pandemic market that treated cloud software as bulletproof. The autumn rally had no trouble finding another gear.
A sharp autumn growth scare had shaken the wider market, and plunging bond yields sent nervous capital scrambling for safe dividends. Regulated utilities were the shelter of choice, and the defensive bid carried straight through.