A look at the day ahead in markets from Julien Ponthus. One might think that with CNN’s popular gauge of investor sentiment stuck on ‘extreme fear’, it would take some seriously good news to lift up markets these days. But all it took yesterday was a whiff of COVID-19 optimism from China and decent U.S. retail data to send global equity markets back into a jolly bullish risk-on mode. Tech and growth stocks that many investors would no longer touch with a barge pole outperformed with Microsoft, Apple Tesla and Amazon lifting the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq higher. The upbeat mood was hard to reconci…