Last week saw a surprisingly strong rally as the stock market was driven higher by a sharp drop in interest rates.\u00a0 The S&P 500 gained 5.9% and the Nasdaq gained 6.6%.\u00a0 The rally brought the S&P 500 back above\u00a0both its 200-day and 50-day moving averages.\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile, the US 10-yr Treasury yield declined 31 basis points this week to 4.51% and the 2-yr yield fell\u00a017 basis points this week to 4.86%.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An important contributor to the decline in rates was the Fed. The Fed\u00a0voted unanimously to leave the target range for the fed funds rate unchanged at 5.25-5.50% and\u00a0Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference was deemed to be less hawkish than what was expected. Mr. Powell noted\u00a0that the Fed has come very far with its rate-hike cycle and that policy decisions have gotten more two-sided.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rate-sensitive real estate sector was the best performer, up 8.6%, followed by the financial (+7.4%), consumer discretionary (+7.2%), and information technology (+6.8%) sectors. The “worst” performing sector was energy, which still climbed 2.3% this week.\u00a0 Just about everything participated in the rally. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) rose 5.9%, the Vanguard Mega Cap Growth ETF (MGK) rose 6.6%, and the Russell 2000 Value Index rose 7.6%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were many quarterly reports this last week headlined by Apple (AAPL). The numbers for Apple from the September quarter were positive with solid iPhone sales leading to a nice EPS beat and in-line revenue. However, on the conference call, Apple said it expects December quarter revenues to be flat vs last year, which would imply weaker than expected iPhone sales for the important holiday season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13178,"template":"","categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15247","opinion-article","type-opinion-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion-article\/15247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opinion-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opinion-article"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creandgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}