S&P 500 Continues its Rally, Bitcoin is Volatile and More Stories

Vonetta Logan's weekly recap of the big business, news, markets, political, cultural and viral trending stories featured this week on Daily Dose

What’s up tastynation! Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekly Dose! Each week, I recap the top stories that I covered on Daily Dose. If you missed any eps of Daily Dose you can catch up on them here. 


Things are feeling a little bittersweet over here. Friday was our last day in the tasty studios at 19 N. Sangamon. Starting Monday, tastylive will be broadcasting from a gorgeous new studio. You can get a sneak peek here.

Here are some things I found when I cleaned out my desk drawer: a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of Fireball, and a Tim Hortons gift card. I guess a road trip to Canada is in order, but I will need someone else to drive, I'm full of desk whiskey.

Let’s get to this week’s recap. 

To market, to market 

It was definitely a volatile week for all the major indices. To start the week, the S&P 500 (SPY) was off to another great start.

The index has been up for 16 of the last 18 weeks, and the last time that happened was 1971. Also, in a surprise to no one, the S&P outperforms even actively managed funds.

Not to be outdone, the Nasdaq (QQQ) also started the week off strong. That index hasn’t had a major pullback, a down move more than 2.5%, in over 300 days. Forget 300 days of summer, it's 300 days of Nasdaq.

I call shenanigans, but this guy says an overbought market is a healthy market. Maybe I can get him to write the same newsletter about my nearly overdrawn checking account.

External events

There were also lots of external mini binary events that the market was watching this week.

First up, Super Tuesday sent thousands to the polls across 16 states and territories.

Then on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, testified before Congress. Powell reinforced his position that the Fed wasn’t quite ready to cut rates. There was a nice downturn in the markets early in the week due to lots of weakness in the Magnificent 7.

Tesla (TSLA) got hit particularly hard this week as it was downgraded by Morgan Stanley (MS).

On Thursday, President Joe Biden delivered a fiery State of the Union speech, where he announced his administration's crackdown on junk fees. Which is something we can all agree on.

Finally, on Friday we got our employment situation to cap off the wild week. Check out Chris Vecchio’s recap here. 

Social distortion

This week was a rollercoaster ride for pretty much any social media entity. The big story of the week came on Tuesday, when the whole coterie of Meta (META) subsidiaries—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all went offline.

The Meta outage lasted a few hours, much to the delight of Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk because everyone flocked to the site to post their reactions in real time.

In a direct battle with music streaming service Spotify (SPOT), the European Union fined Apple (AAPL) nearly $2 billion in the EU for abusing its market position to dominate music apps.

To be real, I think a lot of people are still mad about that automatic U2 album download Apple forced us all into years ago. Bono has since apologized.

In other news at the intersection of social media and technology, Google (GOOGL) has heard our cries that internet search sucks lately and it is vowing to do better. Google announced changes to its search ranking algo, which should get rid of spammy AI-generated sites.

Meanwhile, Meta is building a massive AI model to power its entire video ecosystem. Meta’s stock has been flat all week, but good news is on the horizon. The U.S. government may eliminate Meta’s biggest competitor: TikTok.

The U.S. House next week will vote on the bill that gives TikTok parent, ByteDance, six months to divest itself from the app. TikTok, which has more than 170 million monthly active users in the U.S., issued an emergency push notification to get its users to contact members of Congress. 

I also have two winners for the #staypetty award of the week.

First, after a years-long legal battle about app store fees and commissions, it now looks like Apple has blocked Fortnite maker Epic games from accessing the developer store because Apple doesn't like the lawsuits or Epic CEO Tim Sweeney’s social media posts. Just a near perfect level of corporate petulance. Flawless. No notes.

In second place, Roku (ROKU) announced this week it was disabling all of its devices until users opted in to a new user agreement that make it illegal to sue or take part in a lawsuit involving Roku. Yassss we love a forced arbitration qween. Slay!

And finally, in Exhibit A) of why boomers shouldn’t use dating apps. An Air Force contractor was arrested for sharing highly classified information with a “woman” he was chatting with on dating apps. This dude was not even concerned when his new paramour started asking him about troop movements in the Ukrainian countryside. You know, normal first date chit chat. 

There’s so much drama in the BTC 

Honestly, writing this blog each week sometimes feels like the movie Groundhog Day. I try to keep it fresh, keep it sexy, but it seems like every week I must inevitably write about bitcoin (BTC), so here goes.

On Friday, bitcoin hit a new, new, new high for the (I’ve lost count) time this week. Bitcoin broke through the $70,000 threshold for the first time ever, and every insufferable dude who has ever cornered you at a bar to talk about crypto is playing their “to the moon” playlists as loud as possible, while dousing themselves in Drakkar Noir and booting up their reddit boards. Be safe out there, ladies.

I did find one well actually guy who believes the fair market value of bitcoin is actually $35,000.

Speaking of the smell of crypto bros, Binance, whose founder is in custody facing a fine of $4.5 billion for fraud, made a perfume for women. I don’t even want to know what LFG smells like.

Shares of Coinbase (COIN), the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, topped its direct listing price as the stock saw a massive surge this week. Over the past 12 months, Coinbase shares are up 300%.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) also saw its stock surge this week on the back of bitcoin gains.

And of course, the only Bitcoin Bummer of the week goes to the SEC. The federal regulator once again deferred making a decision on green-lighting spot bitcoin ETF options.

The recent surge in bitcoin has also brought about a mini resurgence in NFTs. The famed desert concert for people with more money than sense, Coachella, announced a new NFT collaboration with OpenSea. The NFTs start at the super reasonable price of $1,499 and include VIP passes. Congrats in advance to all the Trustafarians who will score this deal.    

Random chicanery 

These are my favorite funny stories of the week

• Spend the night in a pancake themed rental.
• Oscar Mayer launches NotHotDogs.
• Hidden Valley makes all my cheesy ranch dreams come true!
• Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson to stream on Netflix (NFLX).
• Will Tom Eat It? $300 Tableside Short Rib.

That’s it for this week! See ya next week! 

Vonetta Logan has more than a decade of markets experience and has been a trader for five years. She is an on-air personality, creative writer and news correspondent at tastylive. Vonetta appears Monday-Friday on Daily Dose and contributes to Luckbox Magazine. @vonettalogan

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