Wall Street edges higher in thin post-holiday trade
U.S. stocks rose on Friday (Saturday morning AWST) on weak trading volume in a shortened post-Thanksgiving session, driven by gains in retail and a rebound in technology stocks.
Expectations for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in December strengthened throughout the week, helping to support sentiment in stock markets.
Dow Jones Industrial Index increased by 0.61 percent to 47,716.42 points, S&P 500 index increased by 0.54 percent to 6,849.09 points and Nasdaq Composite increased by 0.65 percent to 23,365.69 points.
While every major S&P 500 sector except healthcare was up, pharmaceutical Eli Lilly was down 2.6 percent.
Intel helped lead the S&P 500 with a 10.2 percent gain after a TF International Securities analyst said the company would begin shipping Apple’s low-end M processor as early as 2027.
All three major indexes reported weekly gains.
S&P 500 rose 3.73 percent, Nasdaq rose 4.91 percent and Dow rose 3.18 percent. The S&P and Dow index remained marginally positive throughout the month after prices stabilized on Friday.
However, the Nasdaq closed up 1.51 percent this month; This reflects growing concerns about AI and technology valuations stretching as investors take profits and reduce risk.
“This is a light post-holiday volume session, as is usually the case, not a lot of activity,” said Cole Smead, CEO of Smead Capital Management.
“But I think everyone has woken up in recent weeks to the fact that the outcome of AI is still very much unknown.”
Futures trading was temporarily disrupted in the morning following the CME Group outage, which temporarily froze currencies, commodities and equity contracts worldwide.
CME’s stock futures offerings tied to US equities are typically heavily traded before US markets open, and investors rely on them to gauge trends and directions.
CME said this was due to a cooling issue in CyrusOne data centers.
Shares of CME Group were marginally higher.
“We got a little lucky today. It was a very low-volume day, but it could have had a much bigger impact,” said Joe Saluzzi, partner, co-founder and head of equity market structure research and co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading.
“This points to the risk of these failures and the connection to markets that could lead to bigger problems.”
This week also kicks off the holiday shopping season, which begins with Thanksgiving on Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday — major sales days for big box retailers.
