The New York Stock Exchange recovered on Friday, regaining confidence in the opening of the US economy, the Dow Jones and the S&P touching few new records at the end of a volatile week.
According to the final results at the close, the Dow Jones index gained 1.39% to 33,072.88 points, gaining in the last minutes of the session a new high. The high tech Nasdaq advanced 1.24% to 13,138.72 points. The S&P 500 rallied 1.66% to 3,974.54 points, surpassing its March 17 high by less than half a point.
“This period of hesitation and rotation which has imposed itself since February is coming to an end,” commented Karl Haeling of LBBW who believes that after the end of the quarter and the Easter holidays, the stock market “and the taste risk will recover ”.
The New York Stock Exchange will be closed on April 2 for the Good Friday holiday, but the bond market will be open for half a session.
Over the week, the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 finally ended up improving despite several sessions of losses, respectively 1.36% and 1.57%. The Nasdaq recovered some ground, dropping only 0.57%.
With the vaccination campaign that allowed 200 million injections in the United States during the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s term, “it means that the economy is moving faster towards reopening,” said Peter Cardillo , from Spartan Capital Securities.
For Karl Haeling, “this is the official excuse for this rise: vaccines and banking news”, that is to say the green light from the Central Bank (Fed), Thursday, re-authorizing share buybacks and dividend distributions by the end of June.
But the analyst believes that the taste for risk illustrates the rebalancing of portfolios before the end of the quarter Wednesday, investors positioning themselves in a market that will be “illiquid” next week.
April, a good month for the Stock Exchange
“The combination of declines in the technology sector in recent weeks and the Dow Jones this week has cleaned up the market healthily,” ready for a fresh start, according to Haeling. “April is historically a bullish month for stocks,” he recalled.
Almost all eleven sectors of the S&P 500 concluded in the green, starting with energy stocks (+ 2.62%), as the price of crude rebounded sharply on Friday, due to the blockade of the Suez Canal by a giant container ship.
The IT sector also rebounded well, with Facebook gaining 1.54% and Netflix + 1.03%.
Among banks, Bank of America gained 2.71%, Citigroup 1.81%, JPMorgan Chase 1.67%.
The session was also marked by the group of shared offices WeWork, which announced on Friday that it was going to make its IPO probably in the 3rd quarter, through a SPAC, these empty shells that facilitate fundraising on the stock market.
Arrival’s electric vans, a group created by a former Russian minister and first listed on the Nasdaq Thursday through a SPAC, saw the stock drop 2.41% on Friday.
Yields on 10-year Treasuries stood at 1.67% from 1.63% the day before, although the PCE inflation index, closely watched by the Fed, showed muted inflation in February at + 0.2%, less than expected. Year on year, inflation accelerated slightly to 1.6%, mainly because of the rise in energy prices.
