Weekly Market Commentary
Small Cap Resurgence Amid Mixed Performance and Sector Shifts
Posted on August 1, 2024
It was another mixed week for the major markets. Last week looked just like the prior week with the Dow Jones alone in positive territory and the other 4 in the red.
The performance in the style boxes also echoed the prior week with losses in the Large Cap Blend and Growth indices while the Value and SMID segments added green. The last few weeks have seen significant outperformance of Small Cap relative to Large Cap as a rotation has appeared from the large and mega cap companies into the smaller and value-oriented segments of the market.
The similarities continued at the Sector Level with Communication Services, Information Technology, and Consumer Discretionary all ending well over 2 percentage points lower.
Last week, the smaller cap segments of the market and more interest-rate sensitive sectors enjoyed the lowering of the yield curve. The 2-year fell the greatest with a drop of 13 basis points. This activity supported the bond market as many of the Bank of America and Barclay indices rose by around a quarter of a percentage point.
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Agent/Broker Dealer Use Only |
The weeks ahead will be filled with earnings releases. Over 1200 companies will be reporting this week. This will be followed by another 1700 companies the first week of August, and 1,000 the week after that.
While the FOMC will be meeting this week for their July meeting, the market has not anticipated a significant likelihood of rates changing at this meeting. September will be a different story, however, with the CME Group having priced in the near certainty of a 25-basis point decrease at the next meeting. Participants will be looking for confirmation of this notion this week, with any significant hawkishness being viewed as a surprise.
Concerned about inflation? Check out our Tips to Reduce Risks In Case of Recession.
The S&P 500® Index is a capitalization index of 500 stock-designed to measure performance of the broad domestic economy through changes in the aggregate market value of stock representing all major industries. https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-500 The Dow Jones Industrial Average® (The Dow®), is a price-weighted measure of 30 U.S. blue-chip companies. The index covers all industries except transportation and utilities. https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/dow-jones-industrial-average The NASDAQ Composite Index measures all NASDAQ domestic and international based common type stocks listed on The NASDAQ Stock Market. Today the NASDAQ Composite includes over 2,500 companies, more than most other stock market indexes. Because it is so broad-based, the Composite is one of the most widely followed and quoted major market indexes. https://indexes.nasdaqomx.com/Index/Overview/COMP The MSCI World Index, which is part of The Modern Index Strategy, is a broad global equity benchmark that represents large and mid-cap equity performance across 23 developed markets countries. It covers approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country and MSCI World benchmark does not offer exposure to emerging markets. The MSCI Emerging Markets (EM) Index is designed to represent the performance of large- and mid-cap securities in 24 Emerging Markets countries of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As of December 2017, it had more than 830 constituents and covered approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country. https://www.msci.com/ The S&P GSCI Crude Oil index provides investors with a reliable and publicly available benchmark for investment performance in the crude oil market. https://us.spindices.com/indices Companies in the S&P 500 Sector Indices are classified based on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®). https://us.spindices.com/indices |