May 2025 Market Recap
May Market Recap After three consecutive months of declines, US equities bounced back with their best month of the year. Stocks didn’t just end their losing streak, they gained enough to offset nearly all their year-to-date losses. All three of the major benchmarks ended May within 1% of where they started the year. Big Tech […]
April 2025 Market Recap
April Market Recap Where do we start? April gave us what felt like a year’s worth of market activity crammed into 30 days. The major stock benchmarks finished lower for the third month in a row, although a marginal loss for the S&P 500 was hardly indicative of the most volatile month in five years. […]
March 2025 Market Recap
March Market Recap The S&P 500 and NASDAQ stock indices recorded their worst quarters since 2022. The S&P 500 fell 5.75% in March, its sharpest drop since December 2022. Investors are worried about Donald Trump’s tariffs. He has promised that all countries will be targeted in the latest round to be announced tomorrow, April 2. […]
February 2025 Market Recap
February Market Recap Tariff threats went up while stocks went down in February. Equities stumbled through their first negative month of the year despite exceptional corporate earnings growth, which shows that optimism is waning even as profitability soars. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average lost between 1.4% and 1.6%. The NASDAQ lost nearly […]
January 2025 Market Recap
January Market Recap In writing these regular summaries of market events, there are some months in which very little seems to happen. And then there are months like this. The headlines were so big and the flow of news so constant in January that markets are still sifting through the economic fallout. Equities managed to […]
December 2024 Market Recap
December Market Recap Short term pain. Long term gains. Stock prices drifted lower in December, driven in part by the Federal Reserve’s outlook for fewer rate cuts in the year ahead. The S&P 500 fell 2.5% in just its third negative month of the calendar year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average performed even worse, losing […]
November 2024 Market Recap
November Market Recap Already on pace for an exceptional year, the stock market got the catalyst it hardly needed in November. The presidential election on November 5 ended up being far less close than polls had indicated. Donald Trump won every swing state up for grabs and most media outlets called the race in Trump’s […]
October 2024 Market Recap
October Market Recap Stocks trended slightly lower in October and the major US equity benchmarks finished in the red for the first time since April. It had been five consecutive months of gains for the S&P 500, which bucked several trends this summer and is still up nearly 20% year-to-date. Investors who subscribed to the […]
September 2024 Market Recap
September Market Recap At long last, rate cuts finally arrived in September. While anticipated for months, the Federal Reserve on September 18 lowered interest rates for the first time in four-and-a-half years (March 2020). The fact that it was a 0.50% cut rather than 0.25% proved to be a pleasant surprise for stocks, which moved […]
August 2024 Market Recap
August Market Recap It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. If stocks were an Olympic sprinter, they would have begun August with a major stumble out of the blocks. Fortunately, US equities were able to recover and hit their stride. By the time Labor Day weekend arrived, all three major indices had clocked […]