Tuesday morning has been all about vaccines. The PFE/BNTX offering will get an FDA review on 12/10, followed by a review of the MRNA data on 12/17. All three stocks have been up over the last four days, though as I wrote earlier, the real winners have been the smaller mRNA technology companies – MRNA and BNTX (though PFE’s double digit gain has not been too shabby for the pharma giant).

Looking back over the long weekend, enough dust has settled from Black Friday and Cyber Monday to make one thing clear.

Sure, the sales event was a success. But not so much for brick-and-mortar stores. Far from seeing a renaissance of in-person shopping, physical retail might actually be doing even worse than before.

For weeks now, the financial media had been hyping up Black Friday as the event that would send brick-and-mortar retail sales through the roof. For a sector that’s been losing ground to Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and other online sites for years, and taken an even larger hit from this year’s lockdowns and social distancing, that would have been very good news.

In anticipation, Macy’s Inc. (M) stock almost doubled in the weeks ahead of Black Friday. Nordstrom Inc. (JWN) and mall REITs had also been climbing.

But the Reality Gap is that this was just hype, nothing more.