Markets Report: Week of November 1, 2021

Halloween's over, and it's the last week before it gets dark before 5pm. Meme coins popped, NFT markets experienced a shake up and the Treasury confirmed that a pandemic-era trend is over. Read on for more.

On the first day of the month, stocks hit record highs after a booming October, which was the S&P 500's best performing month since November of last year. On Wednesday morning, the Treasury announced the first quarter-over-quarter reduction (roughly -5%) of selling longer-term debt since 2016, as borrowing needs taper with Covid. In other news, Robinhood claimed this week that more than 50% of new retail trading accounts opened over the past 5 years were on their platform. How's that for big tech?

Following last week's trend, Opensea continues to bleed market share, with transaction volume declining an astronomical -32.10%—more than $10 million. Meanwhile, niche marketplaces strengthened their position, with CryptoPunks' transaction volume popping off +31.48% ($8.29 M) and NBA Top Shot's jumping almost 3X (+181.97%, $837.68k).

It will be interesting to monitor whether these speciality projects will continue to pop and steal share from warehouse-style marketplaces. Two recent news stories in the NFT world support the opposing ends of this hypothesis: Coinbase, which is opening a bazaar-style peer-to-peer marketplace, claims to have 2 million users on its waiting list, while MLB's specialty project deal with Candy has given the NFT company a valuation of $1.5 billion.

REITs were flat to down on the week ending Monday (VGSLX -0.30%), but the home purchase market continues to stay hot with demand demolishing supply. The median time for homes on market was 16 days, nearly a week quicker than the 22 days at this time last year (NAR data). In other homebuying news, Zillow announced they're ending their home flipping experiment after it didn't go as planned, exiting the game with nearly $3 billion of inventory for sale. It's fairly common to decommission a failed product in the tech world—but when most companies do, it doesn't have macroeconomic ramifications.

Bitcoin is flat-to-up on the week (+0.36%) after a raucous October, while Ethereum continues its slow climb (+3.95%). Meanwhile, meme coins reminded us that their potential to pop is no joke, with both Shiba and Doge in the top 15 of coins by market cap. Together, they're worth more than $70 billion. For context, that's more than the market caps of BMW ($67.72 B), Capital One ($65.92 B) or Adidas ($66.62 B).

Gold was flat-to-down on the week (IAU -0.84%), while oil took a larger dip (-7.52%). Broadly, energy commodities have entered a period of volatility as the market sends mixed signals about the future—OPEC is limiting oil supply, China is capping coal prices and the world is questioning a potential post-Covid future.

Baseball (+0.31%) and soccer (+0.23%) were up on the week, while basketball (-2.61%), football (-1.42%) and hockey fell (-0.47%). With the World Series closing last night on an Atlanta Braves victory, baseball is the only sports index to show growth for the past 7 days and past 90 days. It's likely the market cools as we enter the offseason, evidenced by a decline for the period over the past 60 days.

Meanwhile, early-season basketball excitement drove the market movers this week, as the NBA claims both the biggest winner and loser.

• Biggest Winner: Miles Bridges, Charlotte Hornets, +31.35% - Charlotte's surprisingly decent start paired with three electric 30-pieces from Bridges over the first eight games have sparked All Star whispers. Nevermind that Jaylen Brown put him on a poster.
• Biggest Loser: Nickeil Alexander-Walker, New Orleans Pelicans - Alexander-Walker has posted poor production and low efficiency so far this year after a few bright seasons raised the expectations for his performance. He's 4 for 14, 5 for 15 and 5 for 16 over the last three games (in one showing going 1 for 7 from three)—and being stuck on a middling, small market franchise (will we ever see Zion?) can't help his value either.

• Wine: The major climate change conference with world leaders, COP26, goes down in Glasgow this month. With trends toward greater sustainability across industries and consumer preferences, wine producers question whether the market will continue to purchase vino that isn't produced sustainably over the long term. Perhaps wine investors should consider hedging with the purchase of some sustainable cases.
• Whiskey: Investment platform CaskX is now offering shares in bourbon barrels, a category their research shows to have averaged annual returns of 13.85% over the past 10 years. The company has previously sold shares in scotch casks.
• Farmland: Broader trends across residential and commercial real estate appear to affect farmland as well. Industry experts say more farms are going up for sale by sellers who want to grab a slice of the piping hot market action. However, more supply on market means that prices could potentially cool going into the new year.
• Sneakers: Nike's still king. StockX data analyzed by UK site Money.co.uk show that the athletic-wear giant's shoes, particularly Jordans, perform the best at resale. Turns out Yeezy hasn't jumped over the Jumpman quite yet.