S&P 500 recorded the best week since November 2023. Weekly market recap, trading week 33/2024
Summary of the trading week in several posts with the most interactions on X
In this series, I’ve been bringing out financial posts with the largest number of interactions from my feed on the X platform over the most recent week. I am aware that not everybody uses X regularly so I thought it could provide some value to your analysis, and investment process.
This was a pretty interesting week in financial markets. The S&P 500 rallied 4% and has experienced 7 consecutive days of gains driven by technology stocks. NVIDIA alone skyrocketed by 19%. Notably, gold has finally breached $2,500 decisively and hit a new all-time record.
1) Weekly performance. In the first screenshot attached, you can see last week’s performance of the major US indexes, the VIX volatility index, gold, and Bitcoin.
- S&P 500 finished up by 4.0% and is now just ~2% from its all-time high.
- Nasdaq index was down up by 5.3%
- Dow Jones increased by 2.9%
- Russell 2000 (small caps) ended the week up by 2.9%
- VIX dropped by 28%
- Gold was up by 3.0%.
- Bitcoin declined by 2.3%
For the trading week ending August 23, key events are:
- Fed meeting minutes on Wednesday
- US S&P Global Manufacturing and Services PMI data (less important than ISM) on Thursday
- US Existing Home Sales data for July on Thursday
- US New Home Sales data for July on Friday
- Fed Chair Powell Speech at Jackson Hole Symposium on Friday
- At least 5 Fed speeches
Next week market watchers and investors will be looking for more clearer message from the Fed regarding the potential initiation of the rate-cutting cycle in September. Friday’s Chair Powell's Speech will be especially important as he will be speaking about the economic outlook.
After slightly better-than-expected CPI inflation data on Wednesday, the market is currently pricing a 25% probability of a 0.50% rate cut in September, down from 51% seen a week ago. In other words, a 0.25% reduction is the base case.
2) US homebuyer conditions for US consumers plummeted in July to the lowest level EVER RECORDED…