Jan 194 min
Updated: Jan 20
by Ben Weiss, for the Call to Leap Team
We may have had a short trading week after a holiday weekend, but the action on the market did not take a vacation! After a choppy start to the year, we saw the market bounce back this week in a big way. Let's take a look at what happened and what's coming up...
But first...Starting this week, Steve and I are excited to be refreshing how and when we post articles here. Our goal is to engage with you all in this amazing community more often, while making these posts more digestible and easier to read and use.
On each Friday afternoons, we'll be posting about the Market News & Outlook, as you're seeing here.
Then, on each Sunday afternoons ahead of markets opening on Monday, we'll be sharing our trades for that week in a separate Trading Spaces article.
Finally—and most exciting to me—Steve and I are kicking off a new segment we're calling Healthy Headspace, where we'll share inspirational and thought-provoking nuggets during the work week.
We truly hope you'll enjoy this new format. As always, we hugely appreciate and benefit from your feedback and support. Thanks for being a part of Call to Leap 💙
The market this week
The markets started the week fairly flat but started climbing higher overall to close out the week, building on bullish gains from 2023. In fact, the S&P 500 closed today just under $4840 for an all-time high for the index, beating the previous record set in 2022.
Did you know?...the S&P 500 closed out 2023 with an aggregate market capitalization (adding up all its members market caps) of over $42 trillion! That blows my mind...
By the numbers, S&P 500 (+1.01%), the Dow (+0.12%), Nasdaq (+2.07%), Russell 2000 (-1.69%) finished the week mostly in the green, with big tech companies like MSFT, AAPL, GOOGL, and NVDA (wow...NVDA!) providing much of the lifting. If you're unfamiliar, the Russell 2000 is another popular index that tracks 2000 smaller US companies (or "small-caps"), because the little guys need some love and respect too!
In the news
We heard from Federal Reserve officials that we may not see interest rate cuts until around mid-year 2024, later than some were expecting, causing the markets to react somewhat negatively. The Federal government also continued to squabble over the debt ceiling—we've certainly heard this story before—however, Congress and the White House managed to agree on a short-term spending bill to avert a looming shut down for now.
Apple (AAPL) announced they are temporarily discounting iPhones in China to boost demand. However, this news combined with headwinds from their Apple Watch division caused the stock to slump. AAPL, being as large as it is in market capitalization, has the weight to then noticeably bring the rest of the market down with it. The stock turned around midweek however on positive VR and AI news heading into their earnings announcement coming up in two weeks.
Show me the money... Earnings season continued this week with big financial names reporting their earnings, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, which both exceeded revenue expectations but warned of geopolitical and economic risks on the horizon.
Coming up next week are some big names including Netflix (NFLX) and Tesla (TSLA) as well as airline stocks like United (UAL), Alaska (ALK), and Southwest (LUV—one of my favorite stock symbols). TSLA has seen a recent significant slide after announcing price cuts in the European market, but if past is prologue, their earnings report could sent the stock price in any direction!
Be on the lookout for more of our favorite big tech companies to hold their earnings announcements near the end of the month and into early February, including
Jan 24: TSLA
Jan 25: INTC
Jan 30: GOOGL, AMD, MSFT, SBUX
Feb 1: AAPL, AMZN, META
SPY
QQQ
Friendly reminders from Steve:
Let your money work harder for you...
I'm also getting a 5% APY by having my cash sit in my Fidelity account as I sell my cash-secured puts. Here's the link if you're interested in getting started!
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You got this, everyone! Stay disciplined, pay yourself first, and always invest in your greatest asset—yourself. 🙌🏻
-Ben and Steve
The following article is strictly the opinion of the author and is to not be considered financial/investment advice. Call to Leap LLC and the author of this article do not claim to be a registered financial advisor (RIA) or financial advisor. Please visit our terms of service and privacy policy before reading this article.