Stocks Continue to Move Up: Techs Lead
4:15 pm Monday, August 30th, 2021
U.S. stocks rose on Monday, as investors look past Fed Chair Jerome Powell to August’s jobs report on Friday. European and Asian markets were rallying.
Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon.com (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), and Facebook (FB), which represent about 22.5% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, were up 1-3%.
The S&P 500 sectors that contain these stocks — information technology (+1.0%), consumer discretionary (+1.1%), and communication services (+0.6%) — are trading higher, of course, but so are six other sectors like health care (+0.7%) and consumer staples (+0.4%). The financials (-0.7%) and energy (-0.3%) sectors are the only sectors trading lower.
The outperformance of the growth/defensive-oriented stocks is reportedly because of lingering growth concerns stemming from the Delta variant and Hurricane Ida.
Interestingly, meme stocks are also outperforming amid continued speculative interest from retail investors. The latest meme “stonk” is Support.com (SPRT), which was up 38%. Fintech companies PayPal (PYPL) and Affirm (AFRM), meanwhile, were keying off some fundamental news.
Shares of Affirm surged 47% after the company announced a partnership with Amazon to bring its buy-now, pay-later service to select Amazon customers. PayPal is up 3% after CNBC reported that the company is exploring a stock-trading platform for its U.S. customers.
Despite the record-setting bias in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, the market internals are showing a more mixed picture. Advancing/declining issues are roughly even at the NYSE and Nasdaq, further illustrating the influence that the mega-cap stocks are having today.
Today’s economic data was limited to Pending Home Sales, which unexpectedly decreased 1.8% m/m in July (Briefing.com consensus +0.5%) following a downwardly revised 2.0% decline (from -1.9%) in June.
