The Market is the world’s fastest data processor — a giant, invisible discounting machine that soaks up information and spews out verdicts by the minute. Today, that machine is working at a blinding speed.

It’s fuelled by cash sloshing around global money markets and a creeping optimism that is hanging on a string of hopes, even if they turn out to be fleeting: ‘the vaccine is about to arrive’; ‘do you really need it?’; `Biden can’t raise tax’; `it’s just not pent up demand’; `interest rates will stay low as bond traders shrug off higher inflation’; and RBI with a vast war chest of forex reserves will demolish currency punters trying to seriously short the rupee.

The quarterly numbers have turned out to be better-than-expected, some companies have restored salaries, electricity consumption is up, and GST collections — thanks to a surge in the proportion of official and online sales and transactions — are robust. Data points like these have swept aside, at least for the time, anecdotal evidence of Job Losses and small businessmen being pushed to a corner, and warnings of a second wave by doctors.

By now, almost everyone in the Indian market knows that there will be no massive stimulus from New Delhi. Indeed, the market has not only digested that piece of information, it’s gaining from it — since a modest growth in the government balance-sheet would lower chances of a sovereign downgrade. Indeed, the mood in the market has little to do with the domestic stimulus; rather it’s upbeat despite the absence of a meaningful, generous demand push.

An old plot is playing out. The market is in that familiar, yet uneasy, zone where no one wants to be left behind; no one wants to miss the party, no matter whatever hangover it leaves them with. Larger players with greater access to cheaper funds and better hold over their supply-chain have probably gained comparatively more than midsized and smaller businesses. But both groups will have stocks which are driven by fundamentals and some swayed by an exuberance. Just like the fund managers of listed stocks, private equity houses and wealthy investors in vehicles like the alternative investment funds are chasing unlisted stocks.

Companies are learning to function with smaller workforce and lesser space; consumers are learning to spend less and save more. And with abysmal returns on zero-risk financial assets, where else can they park their savings but equity. It’s a playoff between loss of income, job losses, and lower consumption on one hand, and corporates clawing back into profits on the other.

What then does one track over the next few months? First, to what extent the consumption demand is sustained post Diwali; second, what happens to global markets by the second week of January — in several years what happened during this fortnight determined the fate of the market in the next two months. The Budget can always make a difference, but not too many traders may be counting on it at this point. Chances are that a market that has run a little too ahead may pause for some weeks, even slide a little or see-saw with a short range after December — just to check if hard numbers bear out the soaring expectations it has already built in.