EDITOR'S NOTE

Earnings season continues next week and of course the news will be bad.

Stocks may rise anyway, as they did this week, despite dismal bank results and a headline that was once unimaginable: 22 million jobs lost in just four weeks. CNBC's Patti Domm writes that investors will likely look beyond earnings reports and focus on any news about mitigating the virus and reopening the economy.

It was much the same this past week when a report from a medical news website noted that Gilead was having success treating Covid-19 with its drug, remdesivir. Stocks surged, although the reported success was not based on conclusive data, according to Gilead.

The market needs an effective treatment, or better yet, a vaccine for coronavirus before it is likely to fully recover. CNBC's Tom Franck breaks down the progress the biomedical companies are making, company by company.

"We're in a trading range, a sloppy trading range, until we have confidence that we've got a vaccine or a treatment that can guarantee that consumer behavior won't be severely impaired," said Dennis DeBusschere, head of Evercore ISI's portfolio strategy. "As long as you don't have a strong treatment or vaccine, you're under the cloud of second-wave risk."

Of special note, in this edition of Weekend Brief, we present a new column by Kenneth Squire who formerly wrote the "Activist Spotlight" column for Barron's. He's now going to be presenting his weekly analysis for CNBC and this newsletter - and just in time.

Shareholder activism tends to flourish following sell-offs and with the entire planet reconsidering the ways in which it does business, there are bound to be plenty of changes, many of them initiated by activists such as Starboard.

This week, Squire discusses Starboard's latest target, which he writes, "is a situation where stockholders could greatly benefit from someone coming in from the outside to instill cost discipline."

Thanks for reading Weekend Brief.  Email your thoughts to EveningBrief@nbcuni.com or follow me on Twitter @tellittoal.

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THE WEEK AHEAD

YOUR WEEKEND BRIEFING