US Stocks Climb To Record High On Strong Earnings
4:08 pm Tuesday, August 24th, 2021
U.S. equities rose to record highs as strong corporate earnings and a rally in commodity prices outweighed lingering concerns about the threat of Covid-19 to the global economy.
Supportive factors have included another round of encouraging earnings news, a better-than-expected new home sales report for July, and a nice bounce in the Chinese technology stocks. Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), and Facebook (FB) are also pulling their weights.
Overall price action has been muted, though, with the S&P 500 trading within a ten-point range right below the 4,500 level. The information technology sector (-0.1%) has slowed down the market while weakness in the defensive-oriented stocks has offset some of the gains in the cyclical stocks.
The energy (+1.3%), consumer discretionary (+0.8%), industrials (+0.6%), materials (+0.6%), and financials (+0.6%) sectors are up between 0.6-1.3%. Conversely, the consumer staples (-0.7%), real estate (-0.9%), utilities (-0.5%), and health care (-0.3%) sectors are down between 0.3-0.9%.
Best Buy (BBY), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Medtronic (MDT), and Advance Auto (AAP) were each trading higher following their earnings reports. PANW and MDT shares are trading at record highs.
Specifying the data, new home sales increased 1.0% month-over-month in July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 708,000 (Briefing.com consensus 700,000). The 10-yr yield is up three basis points to 1.29% after trading at 1.27% prior to the report.
Elsewhere, WTI crude futures were up another 3%, bringing its two-day rebound to 8.7% amid data suggesting the Delta variant could be peaking in the U.S.
