The S&P 500 had a winning week and the best month in 2022 closing at 4130 on Friday. Now seven months into the year, it should be noted that the S&P 500 hit its current record closing high of 4796 on the first trading day of 2022. Since then, the S&P 500 has been trending downward. But with Julys monthly gain of nine percent and up of over four percent for the week, it looks as if that trend has been reversed to the upside. The week started flat but got a boost on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve announced a 0.75 percentage point rate increase. Fed Chairman Powell did say that the pace of future rate increases would be data driven, and they sure will have a lot of data to assess since the next Fed meeting isnt until 20/21 September. On Thursday, the GDP report showed a second straight contraction and the U.S. economic growth falling 0.9% for the second quarter. After Thursdays close, the tech sector gave the markets a boost on Friday after Amazon (up 10.36%) and Apple (up 3.28%) had earnings reports beating expectations. On the other side, Roku missed expectations and was hit with a 23.07% loss on Friday. More than half of S&P 500 companies have now reported earnings and 72% have beat expectations. For TSP TIPS, since we made an allocation change at the end of this past week, well hold off on another recommendation and hopefully this bullish trend will mature further.
The S&P 500 had a winning week and the best month in 2022 closing at 4130 on Friday. Now seven months into the year, it should be noted that the S&P 500 hit its current record closing high of 4796 on the first trading day of 2022. Since then, the S&P 500 has been trending downward. But with Julys monthly gain of nine percent and up of over four percent for the week, it looks as if that trend has been reversed to the upside. The week started flat but got a boost on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve announced a 0.75 percentage point rate increase. Fed Chairman Powell did say that the pace of future rate increases would be data driven, and they sure will have a lot of data to assess since the next Fed meeting isnt until 20/21 September. On Thursday, the GDP report showed a second straight contraction and the U.S. economic growth falling 0.9% for the second quarter. After Thursdays close, the tech sector gave the markets a boost on Friday after Amazon (up 10.36%) and Apple (up 3.28%) had earnings reports beating expectations. On the other side, Roku missed expectations and was hit with a 23.07% loss on Friday. More than half of S&P 500 companies have now reported earnings and 72% have beat expectations. For TSP TIPS, since we made an allocation change at the end of this past week, well hold off on another recommendation and hopefully this bullish trend will mature further.