In the Wake of the Las Vegas Shooting

Stocks are broadly higher this morning, as the mass shooting in Las Vegas overnight is being seen as an isolated event, despite the jaw-dropping number of those people murdered in cold blood and wounded.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in Las Vegas, the part of The Strip (south) where the shooting occurred (on MGM's Mandalay Bay property at a wildly popular country music concert featuring the best of the best talent like Jason Aldean, below) has an old-time, small town desert feel to it--It truly feels a bit undeveloped relative to the high tech mid-Strip from the Mandalay on down.

The layout of virtually all Las Vegas venues and The Strip in general makes shootings like these, unfortunately, all too easy for a madman hellbent on destruction and indiscriminate killings. 

Back to stocks, we see the firearms plays, AOBC (formerly SWHC Smith & Wesson), and RGR higher, as they both try to break base bottoms. We have seen these two stocks rally off prior shootings like Sandy Hook, fearing tighter gun laws.

So, I am looking to see if they can hold rallies this time or, instead, if it is a mere one-off rally event before they sink back into their corrective charts.

Regarding the casinos, MGM is taking the brunt of the selling this morning, as they own Mandalay Bay. I sold out of an LVS long for a small win off a morning bounce because I suspect Las Vegas could easily see a bit of a slowdown during what is often their busy season (football season) after a shooting on the scale of what we have just seen. 

All speculators and gamblers think about the concept of luck, some more than others. It is often said that a skilled sports better or poker player is actually fighting luck constantly, to avoid bad breaks and simply relying on their rock-solid skill set to win more often than not. In stocks, we want to catch and avoid lucky breaks often in terms of upgrades, downgrades, buyouts, scandals, breaking news, etc.. 

I wonder how many gamblers early last evening in Las Vegas, long before the shootings occurred, lost money playing "the pit" games (blackjack, roulette, baccarat, etc.), for example, left a given casino and went home or to their hotel rooms anywhere other than the Mandalay Bay, and cursed their own "bad luck," probably thinking they were the unluckiest person alive who could not win a hand of blackjack.

Surely, luck is a relative concept.