5 things to start your day

Meme-stock mania, claims data, and more talk about talk about tapering.  AMC  AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. is adding to yesterday's surge in pre-market trading, with the loss-making theatre chain now worth more than half of the companies in the S&P 500. Traders driving the price higher are testing the capacity of short-sellers to withstand pain as paper losses build on the company. AMC has had a volatile road to the current spike, with the announcement that the company would reward small investors with free popcorn a possible catalyst for the move higher. Or maybe it's just that nothing matters anymore.  Claims  Initial jobless claims are expected to have fallen below 400,000 last week, with continuing claims also slipping when the data is released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. ADP Employment Change for May is published 15 minutes before then and is expected to show employers added 650,000 positions in the month. There is some optimism for tomorrow's payrolls number, with 655,000 new positions forecast for May after April's disappointment.  Paid Post Introducing 25 Park Row — a 21st century icon with panoramic river-to-river views overlooking downtown Manhattan. Residences feature gracious entertaining spaces and timeless interiors designed by COOKFOX Architects and are complemented by a suite of park-facing leisure and fitness amenities. Priced from $2.815M to over $12M. 25 Park Row Taper talk talk  While no Fed official is saying they are talking about reducing the pace of asset purchases, there is an increasing number saying they should be starting to talk about it. Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said yesterday that policy makers need to start discussing the appropriate time to have those discussions. The Federal Reserve Board plans to start selling a portfolio of corporate debt purchased through an emergency lending facility launched last year. Investment banks, meanwhile, are offering ideas on where to find safety from a spike in U.S. yields. Markets quiet Global equites remain in wait-and-see mode as investors look to tomorrow's payrolls data to gauge the chances of Fed tightening while also getting wary of a possible worsening of U.S. China relations. Overnight, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.2% while Japan's Topix index closed 0.8% higher as the country's vaccine program gathered pace. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index was 0.2% lower at 5:50 a.m. S&P 500 futures pointed to a small drop at the open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.603%, oil was broadly unchanged and gold slipped.  Coming up...  The final reading of U.S. May services and composite PMIs is at 9:45 a.m., with ISM services at 10:00 a.m. U.S. oil inventories data are at 11:00 a.m. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker and Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles all speak later. Broadcom Inc., Slack Technologies Inc. and Lululemon Athletica Inc. are among the companies reporting.  What we've been reading Here's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours.  Odd Lots: Dan Ariely on how to win big by betting on human capital.  The world's best hope to end the pandemic needs more doses.  U.S. plows cash into R&D as China triggers "Sputnik moment." Global house prices rise the most since 2006, fueling bubble concerns. Junk-rated pandemic winners brace for a return to normal.  Crypto firms failing to meet money-laundering regulations. Satellites may have been underestimating the planet's warming for decades.  And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morning One of my favorite charts is Nassim Taleb's look at 1001 days in the life of a Thanksgiving Turkey. For years it was probably one of the best (or at least one of the most amusing) metaphors for thinking about risk in the market. Also it was just a very familiar chart for a long time. One day you're in a great stock. A few days later it all unravels and you were invested in a fraud. But now we need something like the reverse Taleb turkey chart. I'm not sure what the metaphor is, only it looks like a chart of AMC... fading and fading and fading and then boom, out of nowhere, soaring. The unforeseeable scenario is not that suddenly the stock is uncovered as a fraud or a Ponzi or something, but rather that a global flash mob suddenly and inexplicably descends on it. Of course this could be a stock or a memecoin or anything else. From zero to a million in no time. Now, people joke about hoping that the Reddit crowd stumbles upon their favorite holdings. Oh, and of course if you're short, then this is brutal. Yesterday alone wagers against the 10 most-shorted names resulted in $4.5 billion in losses. Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. Follow Us Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more. 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