S&P 500 hit its 42nd all-time high this year after a pretty muted week. Weekly market recap, trading week 39/2024
Summary of the trading week using the most popular posts from the X platform
In this series, you can find financial markets posts with the largest number of interactions from my X platform feed over the most recent week. I am aware that not everybody uses X regularly so I thought it could provide some value to your analysis, and investment process.
Last week was rather subdued in the US and pretty heavy in China with US stocks slowly grinding higher and Chinese markets rallying. Notably, the Volatility index VIX also rose, especially on Friday. At the same time, gold hit another all-time record.
1) Weekly performance. In the first screenshot attached, you can see last week’s performance of the major US indexes, the VIX volatility index, gold, and Bitcoin.
- S&P 500 was up 0.6% and hit its 42nd all-time high this year.
- Nasdaq index jumped 1.0%
- Dow Jones increased by 0.6%
- Russell 2000 (small caps) was down 0.1%
- VIX index rose 4%
- WTI Crude Oil fell 4.8%
- Gold was up 1.1%
- Bitcoin rallied 3.8%
For the trading week ending October 4, key events are:
- Fed Chair Powell Speech on Monday
- US ISM Manufacturing data for September on Tuesday
- US Job Opening for August on Tuesday
- US ADP Nonfarm Employment for September on Wednesday
- US Non Farm Payrolls report on Friday
This will be a huge week for markets. Investors will be carefully listening to some new guidance coming from the Fed’s Chairman Jerome Powell as the market is currently pricing in a 53% chance of another 0.50% rate cut in November. There will be also a lot of focus on the US labor market data, primarily on Friday. Wall Street estimates that the economy added 146,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate stayed at 4.2%. Let’s also not forget revisions.
2) US stock market valuations.