Stocks End Higher In Volatile Session: Tech Leads
5:04 pm Thursday, November 18th, 2021
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq remained positive Thursday on Wall Street, with investors taking cues from upbeat retail and technology earnings despite hawkish inflation comments from a Federal Reserve policymaker.
NVIDIA (NVDA) was setting the performance pace with an 8.5% gain on pleasing earnings news and upside Q4 revenue guidance. Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Alphabet (GOOG) were up between 1-3%.
Apple made a recent push to record highs on a Bloomberg report indicating that the company is aiming for a fully-autonomous vehicle by as soon as 2025.
As for the broader market, value/cyclical are floundering amid growth concerns attributed to an uptick in COVID-19 cases and inflation pressures that could eat into profit margins. On a related note, New York Fed President Williams (FOMC voter) said that long-run inflation expectations are increasing.
Interestingly, riskier assets like the Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), Rivian (RIVN), and cryptocurrencies are noticeably weak right now, further dampening the speculative energy in the market.
Declining issues outpace advancing issues a 2:1 margin at the NYSE, and seven of the 11 S&P 500 sectors are holding modest losses ranging from 0.1% (energy) to 0.6% (consumer staples). The heavily-weighted information technology (+1.0%) and consumer discretionary (+1.0%) are unsurprisingly atop the leaderboard with 1% gains.
Retail stocks are their own story today, bucking the negative trend in the market following a batch of positive earnings reports from the likes of Macy’s (M), Kohl’s (KSS), BJ’s Wholesale (BJ), and Victoria’s Secret (VSCO).
From a broader perspective, the price action in the S&P 500 is mirroring consolidation activity with narrowing leadership. As a reminder, the market is still awaiting answers on the Fed Chair nomination and the CBO scoring of the Build Back Better Act.
