US STOCKS – S&P 500, Dow close at record highs on tech…..
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average notched record closing highs in a shortened Black Friday session, lifted by select technology stocks, while retail was in focus as the holiday shopping season kicked off. Information technology stocks .SPLRCT including Nvidia NVDA.O helped boost the benchmark S&P 500, while the industrial and financial sectors lifted the blue-chip Dow.
Investors monitored shoppers’ response to deep Black Friday discounts. Adobe Analytics estimated consumers would spend a record $10.8 billion in online purchases, up 9.9% from Black Friday last year. Shares of Target TGT.N , Hasbro HAS.O and Macy’s M.N rose.
The S&P 500 rose 0.56% to 6,032.44 points. The Nasdaq gained 0.83% to 19,218.17 points, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.42% at 44,910.65 points. S&P 500 index breached its intraday record high of 6,025.42 set on Nov. 26.
Chip stocks rebounded from Wednesday’s declines, sending the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index .SOX higher. The small-cap Russell 2000 index .RUT also rose as Treasury bond yields retreated further from multi-month highs. Investors were pricing in expectations that Trump’s pro-business policies could spur economic growth and corporate profits. However, concerns prevailed that they could also stoke inflation, slow the pace of the Fed’s rate cuts and weigh on global growth.
Traders expect the U.S. central bank to lower borrowing costs by 25 basis points at its December meeting, but see it pausing rate cuts in January, the CME Group’s Fed Watch showed. Crypto stocks rose on the back of gains in bitcoin BTC=, boosting MicroStrategy <MSTR.O> and MARA Holdings MARA.O . Applied Therapeutics APLT.O plunged after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declined to approve its drug for the treatment of a rare genetic metabolic disease.
Reporting by Saeed Azhar in Toronto and Johann M Cherian and Purvi Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Richard Chang.
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