Happy Sunday, Traderade family! I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday break. We have an exciting week ahead of us, especially with the volume of key economic data we have coming out. Let's dive in!
The week that was
Last week we saw a a holiday-shortened week levitation in equities, with most of the S&P 500 participating to the upside, with some noteworthy exceptions, like AAPL, AMZN, META, GOOGL, and TSLA. The only US big techs that performed well were MSFT and NVDA.
We saw noteworthy strength in utilities, which were up 5.27%. Consumer staples were up 3.19%. Low volatility large caps also outperformed their high beta peers by 1.01% during the week that was.
All of this points to a relatively risk-off rotation underneath the surface. That is to say, despite there being widespread positive breadth, the best performing sectors were defensive and the majority of the gains were in low volatility stocks.
We had a wild week in commodities. Coffee was caffeinated enough to move up 7.27%, natural gas had fiery demand, sending it climbing 6.7%. On the other side, WTIC oil slid 4.06%, with wheat profit harvesting leading to a 3.7% decline.