Cruise stocks up despite COVID-19 outbreaks, bitcoin extends slide, Tesla's 'bullish trend'

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre discusses the mixed stock performance today, including travel stocks after COVID-19 spread to 89 cruise ships, bitcoin adding to losses, and Tesla receiving a bullish note from Argus Research.

Video Transcript

[? KARINA MITCHELL: ?] Let's talk about some of the things that are leading markets today in one direction or the other. And Jared, you've been watching it all. And cruise lines in hot water today, as COVID spreads to nearly 90 cruise ships, cruise lines, you know, in trouble and sparking the CDC to look at doing some investigations. One Senator calling for a halt to cruises, calling them Petri dishes.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. That would be Senator Richard Blumenthal. I'll get to those comments in a second. First of all, the headline number, these are 89 cruise ships, as you said, nearly 90 cruise ships that have COVID cases that are running rampant. And fortunately, the hospitalizations are down on the virus.

But let me just get to some of these comments here. Also, we can pull up the YFi interactive, where I am looking at the intraday price action on this heat board. But I want to draw your attention to a month-to-date look. You might be surprised that this travel sector here has performed so well in the face of Omicron, in the face of everything else that's gone on in December. You can see Carnival Cruise Lines up 19% for the month, although it is negative just by a little bit for the year. And I'm also going to pull up Norwegian Cruise Lines. It's up 13% for the month of December but down a similar amount year to date.

Now, so Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, he's saying that the cruise companies and health agencies, they should stop these ships from sailing, saying that they are, "repeating recent history as Petri dishes of COVID-19 infection." Also saying, tweeting this time, "time for CDC and cruise lines to protect consumers and again pause, docking their ships."

And then we have a spokesman for Carnival Cruise line saying, "our health and safety protocols put in place have proven to be effective time and time again over the past year, with our sailings being restarted across each of our brands." And just to give you an idea of how many ships per carrier out there, Carnival, 32 of the 89, Royal Caribbean, 25, Norwegian 15, and 4 by Disney, Karina.

[? KARINA MITCHELL: ?] And then Jared, not too long ago Bitcoin pushing an all-time record high of 69,000, but extending its slide today, back below under 50,000, adding to its December tally of losses.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah. Well, Bitcoin is volatile. We know that. I just haven't seen a record high in some time. And so interest dies off a little bit. But huge interest in the crypto space overall. This is a year-to-date look of Bitcoin. Here are those record highs, close to 70,000 that we were just talking about.

And I've been looking at the price action over the last two months. I just want to get a candlestick chart, so I can see this a little bit better. Now we had the beginnings of a breakout. And it doesn't mean that we have to go up from there. But we are testing the lower end of that range. So we kind of want to see price break up from here and certainly not breach 42,000. That was that little flash crash in Bitcoin towards the beginning of the month.

Just looking at some of the other coins here, especially on a year-to-date basis, I've been writing about a lot of these, because Bitcoin is one of our top 10 trending tickers for the year. But Ether, up 420%. And some truly eye watering numbers here. Solana, we've been playing that interview with Zac earlier in the show. That's up at 9,500%. Polygon is up 14,000%, basically. Dogecoin, up 3,000%. Hex, up 2,000%. So definitely been a breakout for a number of coins.

And I've got to think back. I first heard about Dogecoin from Elon Musk in I think it was January or February, kind of started a little revolution there, I think.

[? KARINA MITCHELL: ?] Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, I heard it all the first time through Elon Musk. Moving on, the Yahoo Finance Plus Investment Idea of the Day is a bullish call on Tesla by Argus Research, as it looks like Elon Musk has finished his round of selling for now. What's behind that call, Jared?

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. And let's go back to the YFi Interactive, where I'm looking at the year-to-date price action in Tesla. And you can see, it's been pretty rocky since November, after crescendoing there and peaking there, back down below 1,000. It's been kind of a rocky ride, but some really positive price action recently.

And I want to get to these notes by Argus Research. And I'll just pull these up here. Tesla has a bullish trend and they're looking at a long-term target of $1,313, and that's bumped up from $1,010. And they're saying that Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have completed his Tesla stock sale, selling about 10% of his ownership stake. So their revised target price of $1,313 implies a return of approximately 30% from current prices. And then they go through why they're raising some of their earnings estimates, saying they want to reflect their modestly higher revenue and automotive segment gross margin assumptions, excuse me.

Not going to go through all the language here. But bottom line, the price action in Tesla, picking up a bit recently and looking fairly bullish on both the technical and the fundamental side.

Karina.