2025-12-19 21:14:00
It was a week in two parts as heavy selling hit markets to start the week as the post-FOMC slump continued. That turned around yesterday in part due to strong revenues from Micron and the bounce continued today. A lower US CPI also helped even if it was likely skewed by data collections problems due to the government shutdown.
On net, for the week the S&P 500 finished the week virtually flat.
On the day:
- S&P 500 +0.8%
- Nasdaq Comp +1.1%
- Russell 2000 +0.8%
- DJIA +0.3%
- Toronto TSX +1.2%
Today was a strange day because it featured the largest options expiration in history — an estimated $7.1 trillion. Ultimately, that led to some fairly normal price action after a burst of buying at the open. We spent the last half of the day in a tight range.
The winners on the day featured a mixture of recent losers (short covering?) and some momentum names:
- Carnival Cruise Lines
- Moderna
- Micron
- Oracle
- AMD
- Norwegian Cruise lines
All were up more than 5% to lead the S&P 500.
The laggards:
- Nike (-10.9%)
- Lamb Weston
- DH Horton (housing is struggling)
- Lululemon
The Mag7 names were mostly restrained, which might have been due to heavy options expiries:
- NVDA +3.4%
- MSFT -0.1%
- AMZN +1.0%
- TSLA -0.2%
- AAPL -0.5%
- META +0.2%
- GOOG +0.6%
