Axios Closer

November 08, 2021
Today's newsletter is 722 words, a 3-minute read.
đ The dashboard: The S&P 500 rose 0.1% to (yet another) record high.
- Biggest gainer? Semiconductor giant AMD (+10%). It says it won Meta (fka Facebook) as a chip customer.
- Biggest decliner? Concert promoter Live Nation (-5%). Keep reading for more.
1 big thing: Stay-at-home trade implodes

Stocks are at all-time highs. Onetime pandemic-era winners are moving sharply in the other direction.
Why it matters: Stocks move for all types of reasons. But the declines reflect a shift that's sticking: At-home workouts and remote learning are out. Travel and gyms are in.
- What's happening: "Folks are saying, 'Hey you know, I'm going back to the office two days a week, perhaps I should go back to my old gym routine,'" says Ross Klein, a fund manager at Changebridge Capital, which is invested in gym chain Planet Fitness.
What's new: As the world makes bigger reopening strides, stay-at-home companies are issuing fresh warnings that the good times are behind them. The former "losers" say recovery has arrived.
- Take Peloton, which said last week the average number of times users work out with their at-home equipment each month fell again â a sign people are returning to gyms (or opting not to work out at all).
- That same day, Planet Fitness reported the best quarterly member growth it's ever seen this time of year. Its stock is near all-time highs; Peloton's has shed over a third of its value.
The bottom line: Investors are figuring out whether the lockdown winners will "have the sales in the future they had when people couldn't do anything else," says Cole Smead, a portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management.
- Online education platform Chegg is among the latest to signal the answer is no: It warned sales will take a hit as students return to classrooms.
2. Charted: The movie theater recovery

New update from AMC, a favorite among Reddit traders: It saw 40 million theater-goers last quarter â a big rebound from this time last year (6 million).
- That's still a far cry from pre-pandemic times when twice as many people hit the movies in the third quarter of 2019.
Reality check, courtesy of chair and CEO Adam Aron: "No one should have any illusions that there is not more challenge ahead of us still to be met. The virus continues to be with us, we need to sell more tickets in future quarters than we did in the most recent quarter."
3. Whatâs happening
đ Live Nation Entertainment, which organized this past weekend's tragic Astroworld Festival in Houston, has a decades-long record of safety violations, including a 2012 incident that led to an employeeâs death after a fall through a âfalse ceiling.â (CNN)
đ° New York regulators handed out new online sports-betting licenses to nine casino and online gaming operators. (Bloomberg)
4. The Twitterverse has spoken


Tesla stock fell about 5% from its closing level on Friday, before CEO Elon Musk decided he was going to flip 3.5 million coins to determine whether or not $20 billion of stock was about to hit the market, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.
Why it matters: Musk's decision to poll Twitter was very consequential: After more than 2 million tweeps told Musk he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares, the markets took him at his word that he would do so, triggering a capital gains tax bill that's likely to be on the order of $4 billion.
Be smart: Some kind of large-scale share sale from Musk was always likely thanks to the fact that he's going to have about $30 billion of income next year. This particular poll, however, was predicated on the idea that as long as Musk's stock gains were unrealized, he didn't need to pay any tax on them.
- "Whether or not the worldâs wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldnât depend on the results of a Twitter poll," tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden. "Itâs time for the Billionaires Income Tax." (Musk replied, but in the interests of decorum, we shall not go into detail about what he said.)
5. Pic du jour: Travel milestone
Photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images
For the first time in almost two years, visitors from over 30 countries on nonessential trips can gain entry to the U.S. â as long as they are vaccinated against COVID-19.
- Above ... A Lufthansa flight crew today waves on the tarmac to a flight bound for Miami from Munich.
6. What theyâre saying
âFor months we all used these terms like eviction âtsunamiâ and âfalling off the cliff.' ... It was not going to happen overnight. Certainly it would take weeks and months to play out.ââ Lee Camp, a St. Louis-based attorney who represents tenants facing eviction, tells the New York Times that evictions are ticking up â slowly, but surely.
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Catch up on the day's biggest business stories and look ahead to important trends. Led by Nathan Bomey.
