S&P 500 pulled back by 2% after hitting its 38th all-time high this year. Weekly market recap, trading week 29/2024
Summary of the trading week in several posts with the most interactions on X
In this series, I’ve been bringing out financial posts with the largest number of interactions from my feed on the X platform 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.
That was another volatile week in the markets with the Volatility index VIX spiking by 33%. Notably, US technology stocks have finally seen some pullback. As a result, the Nasdaq 100 index is now up 16% year-to-date, versus 23% seen a few days ago. Moreover, small-capitalization stocks have seen a quite sharp reversal.
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 ended the week down by 2%, the most since April. This has been driven by US technology stocks with the Semiconductor sector underperforming which was down by 9%. NVIDIA, also saw a 9% drop.
- Nasdaq index was down by 3.6%
- Dow Jones was up +0.7%
- Russell 2000 (small caps) ended the week up by 1.6%
- VIX skyrocketed by 33%
- Gold declined by 0.8%.
- Bitcoin saw a massive rally of 13%.
For the trading week ending July 26, key events are:
- US existing home sales data on Tuesday
- US new home sales data on Wednesday
- US Q2 2024 GDP on Thursday
- US PCE inflation data for June on Friday
- US Michigan Consumer Sentiment on Friday
- Q2 2024 earnings reports - 31% of the S&P 500 companies are expected to release
US GDP and PCE inflation data will be in focus as well as earnings. US GDP is expected to grow by 2% in 2Q, up from 1.4% in Q1. Inflation is estimated to increase by 2.5% year-over-year for both the Headline metric and Core PCE (excluding food and energy).
In terms of earnings, Tuesday will be the most exciting with Tesla and Google’s parent Alphabet reporting after the market close.
2) Hospital services prices in the US have skyrocketed by a WHOPPING 256% since 2000.