ClientFirst Financial Strategies
Financial Planning and Portfolio Management
Although Friday’s US employment report appeared favorable, we had a mixed bag of results this week from the three major US stock market indices (i.e., DJIA: -0.12%, S&P 500: +0.06%, Nasdaq: +0.65%).
We have seen two consecutive weeks of gains in the major US stock market indices (i.e., DJIA: +0.31%, S&P 500: +1.79%, Nasdaq: +1.99%). As we all know, two data points do not necessarily make a trend.
Finally, the US indices had a week of positive returns (i.e., DJIA: +5.48%, S&P 500: +6.15%, Nasdaq: +8.18%), posting the largest weekly gains since November 2020! The question remains, “what caused it?”
Certainly, the atrocities in Ukraine have our utmost attention. It makes it easy to understand why all three major US stock market indices lost ground again last week (i.e., DJIA: -2.00%, S&P 500: -2.88%, Nasdaq: -3.54%), leaving the year-to-date results -9.34%, -11.79% and -17.90% respectively.
Thursday morning, per normal, the markets reacted violently to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but, surprisingly, rebounded to actually post slight gains in two of the three major US stock market indices for the shortened trading week (DJIA -0.1%, S&P 500 +0.8%, Nasdaq +1.1%).