The S&P 500 on Friday ended lower after an up-and-down session as investors weighed spiking cases of COVID-19 and Apple Inc’s announcement of fresh store closures against anticipated stimulus and continued economic recovery.
The S&P 500 ultimately settled in the red, along with the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ closed nominally higher.
“You’ve got these dueling forces with [US Federal Reserve] stimulus and the consumer spending again on one side, and on the other side the resurgence [of COVID-19] in pockets of areas around the globe,” said Matthew Keator, senior partner at Keator Group LLC, a wealth management firm in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Apple Inc announced it is temporarily shutting some stores again in Florida, Arizona, South Carolina and North Carolina, which have seen a spike in novel coronavirus cases in the past few days.
“Apple is the canary in the coal mine with respect to other businesses,” Keator said. “You’ll start to see other businesses do similar things in some of the states where we’re seeing the virus re-emerge.”
However, “there’s also a feeling that the Fed is acutely aware of what’s going and will help where and when needed,” Keator added.
New cases of COVID-19 set records across at least six US states, and mandated mask use is becoming more common as economies continue reopening. China, where the pandemic originated but had been contained, also reported an uptick in new cases of the disease.
Still, for the week, the S&P 500, the Dow and the NASDAQ posted solid percentage gains, with the Dow gaining 1.04 percent, the S&P rising 1.86 percent and the NASDAQ increasing 3.73 percent.
The S&P 500 and the Dow are now at 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent shy of their respective all-time highs reached in February. The tech-heavy NASDAQ stands at 1.3 percent below its last closing high reached on June 10, after breaching that level earlier in the session.
Trading volume is typically light on summer Fridays as investors head into the weekend, but Friday marked “quadruple witching,” in which futures and options expiries occur, and that typically translates into elevated volume and liquidity. The S&P is synchronizing its delayed rebalancing to take advantage of that liquidity.
In a video conference, US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that the economic recovery from the pandemic is set to be challenging and there would be no quick fix.
The Dow fell 208.64 points, or 0.8 percent, to 25,871.46, the S&P 500 lost 17.6 points, or 0.56 percent, to 3,097.74 and the NASDAQ Composite added 3.07 points, or 0.03 percent, to 9,946.12.
Of the 11 sectors in the S&P 500, 10 lost ground, with healthcare the sole gainer.
Airlines, hit particularly hard by the economic lockdowns, were down sharply, with the S&P 1500 Airline index falling 4.2 percent.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc, the world’s largest movie theater operator, dipped 2.0 percent after its announcement that it would reopen theaters at about 450 locations in the US next month was tempered by renewed shutdown fears.
Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 1.66-to-1 ratio; on the NASDAQ, a 1.15-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
The S&P 500 posted 22 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 134 new highs and three new lows.
Volume on US exchanges was 15.84 billion shares, compared with the 13.17 billion average over the past 20 trading days.
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