Hope you are all doing well. U.S. stock indexes rose around 2%, recovering ground lost in the previous week’s retreat. At Friday’s close, the Dow eclipsed the record high that it had achieved just 11 days earlier, the S&P 500 finished 0.5% shy of its record, and the NASDAQ ended 1.5% below its highest-ever close. With Thanksgiving around the corner I have broken down this week’s update using Thanksgiving foods.
Turducken
The market has had its own tasty mix of 3 perfectly performing assets. Bitcoin, small caps and value stocks. The price of the most widely traded cryptocurrency rose to a record high for the third week in a row. After finishing the previous week at around $91,000, Bitcoin was trading above $99,000 on Friday afternoon. At the start of November, the price was around $70,000. Rallies on Thursday and Friday for a U.S. small-cap stock benchmark, the Russell 2000, pushed the index to a weekly return of 4.5%.
That result completely offset the previous week’s 4.0% decline. Even with the earlier setback, the Russell 2000’s month-to-date gain for November is nearly 10% as of Friday’s close. Thanks in large part to a small-cap surge just after this month’s U.S. election. The U.S. large-cap value stock benchmark significantly outpaced its growth counterpart, eroding some of the growth style’s year-to-date performance advantage. The value index posted a 2.5% return for the week versus 1.7% for the growth benchmark.
Cranberry Sauce
Like the side dish, the first post election reading of sentiment was a little tart. U.S. consumer sentiment showed a modest downturn relative to a preliminary reading from a consumer survey done the day before the November 5 vote. Friday’s final reading from the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index showed the gauge slipping to 71.8 from the 73.0 preliminary figure.
Pumpkin Pie
The S&P 500 earnings like the pie maintained its consistency throughout the entire earnings season. With nearly all third-quarter results in, companies in the S&P 500 are expected to post an average earnings gain of 5.8% over the same quarter a year ago. If that positive result holds, it would mark the index’s fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year earnings growth.
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