Alex Rankine Markets editor
America’s benchmark S&P 500 stock index has reached a new all-time high. “After a rocky start to the year” the US market “has found its footing”, say Krystal Hur and Nicole Goodkind for CNN. The S&P ended last week at 4,839.81 points, eclipsing the previous 4,796.56 record that had stood since 3 January 2022. The rally continued this week, with both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 technology-stock benchmarks reaching further record highs on Monday and Tuesday. US shares have gained 35% since their October 2022 low.
Altitude sickness
It doesn’t feel much like a bull market, says Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times. A “fierce” rally that began in October has given way this month to a “wheezing sideways” market. The high has been driven by a handful of tech stocks, while two-thirds of companies in the S&P 500 have actually seen their share prices slip. Stocks might be heading for “a bout of altitude sickness”.
This rally is not as narrowly focused on a few tech stocks as often claimed, says John Authers on Bloomberg. Exclude the “Magnificent Seven” tech megacaps from your calculation, and the S&P is still not far off an all-time high. Similarly, compare performance with the S&P 500’s last peak two years ago and you will find that one of the biggest losers over the past two years is actually tech giant Tesla (down 40%). By contrast, “the best-performing sector has been energy, gaining 40%”.
The jump in US share prices over the past two months had a clear cause, says Ben Levisohn in Barron’s: markets began to bet that the US Federal Reserve had stopped raising rates and was planning cuts. Yet this month has seen Fed policymakers pour cold water on the idea of imminent cuts.
So why has the rally continued? Recent data has fuelled optim
