This past week, stocks pushed to a fresh record, then gave a little back on Friday as inflation came in softer-than-expected. Both CPI and PPI prints cooled the case for a September rate hike, and Friday's weak retail sales report and a softer read on consumer sentiment nudged the index down about 0.2% into the close.
The week the labor market cracked was the week stocks had their best run since April. Friday’s close of 7,757.64 on the S&P 500 set a record, up 3.6% over five sessions. The Nasdaq Composite gained 5.2% to 26,690.62, and the Dow added roughly 3% to 54,036.93.
The S&P 500 closed the week at 7,489.72, up 1.1%; however, that headline hides nearly everything that mattered.
The S&P 500 finished the week at 7,411.98, down about 0.6%, as an AI capex scare and an oil shock collided into its second straight weekly decline and the first back-to-back down weeks since March. The headline number hides what actually happened. Underneath a falling index, the average stock held up just fine.
The headline number this week was boring, but the action underneath was not, as the momentum meltdown was tearing through the market's most crowded trade. The S&P 500 slipped about 1.5% to close at 7,457.69, the Nasdaq 100 gave back roughly 4%, and the Dow held up with a fractional loss.
The tape flipped its script this week. As we noted two weeks ago, we rotated back to the mega-cap growth stocks. Since then, the mega-cap complex grabbed the wheel again and dragged the index within a whisker of a new record. The S&P 500 rose 1.38% to close Friday at 7,575. That leaves it less than 1% below the June 2 all-time high of roughly 7,612. The Nasdaq Composite added about 1.8%, and the winners were exactly the names you would guess.
It was a holiday-shortened week, with the market closed Friday for the Fourth. The S&P 500 still added about 2% to close near 7,483, capping its best quarter in six years
The headline looks ugly until you turn it over. The S&P 500 finished the week at 7,306, down 2.4% from the prior Friday, while the Nasdaq 100 dropped a hard 4.6% as the megacap technology names that have carried this market all year finally took a real hit. Most stocks rose anyway.
For a week that delivered a hawkish regime change at the Fed and the largest options expiration in history, the tape held up remarkably well. All four major indices finished green.