Market indexes put on a display of strength to kick off a fresh week of trading — looking, perhaps, for a fourth-straight week in the green. This after a mixed start in pre-market trading, without a lot of shifting winds to change course. The Dow, which was down a couple hundred points early today, closed nearly +104, +0.30%, the S&P more than doubled this at +0.81%, the Nasdaq doubled the S&P at +1.90% (271 points), and the Russell 2000 grew +0.14%.
The
Twitter
TWTR
news this morning, when it was reported
Tesla
TSLA
CEO Elon Musk was buying more than 9% of the social media platform. Twitter shares gained +27% on the day, helping the Nasdaq surge to its index-leading performance — which was also assisted by healthy trading from
Microsoft
MSFT
and
salesforce
CRM
.
On the other side,
Starbucks’
SBUX
shares shed -3.7% on the day, as its third-time CEO Howard Schultz has announced it is cancelling its $20 billion share buyback program that had been touted just three weeks ago. Schultz’s declaration that Starbucks will instead invest in “people and stores,” suggesting the CEO is countering union-building measures among Starbucks’ workforce. We’ve seen similar phenomena at
Amazon
AMZN
, which is facing its own unionization challenges.
Defensive sectors — aside from the tech boost from the Twitter news today — continue to outperform the market. Utilities, Real Estate, Healthcare and Staples, to name but a few, led trading for the day. Thus, even though we’re experiencing sustained bullish sentiment in the market over the past near-month, we’re doing so adhering to our cyclical plays more so than our big growth names, at least at this stage of the rally.
Factory Orders
for February were released this morning, and posted an expected negative figure that was not as low as analysts had predicted: -0.5%, from the +1.5% posted in January. We hadn’t seen a negative monthly Factory Orders number since the -0.1% reported in April 2021, and the 12-month trailing average sits at a solid +1.0%.
Core Capital Equipment Orders
, also for February, were also negative: -0.2% versus expectations of -0.3%.
Questions or comments about this article and/or its author? Click here>>
Just Released: Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2022
In addition to the investment ideas discussed above, would you like to know about our 10 top buy-and-hold tickers for the entirety of 2022?
Last year’s 2021
Zacks Top 10 Stocks
portfolio returned gains as high as +147.7%. Now a brand-new portfolio has been handpicked from over 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank. Don’t miss your chance to get in on these long-term buys
Access Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2022 today >>
Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days.
Click to get this free report