00:00Wall Street's main indexes closed higher on Thursday, December 18th, as a soft inflation report fed expectations for interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve while trade-maker Micron's blowout forecast signals strong AI demand.
00:14The Consumer Price Index report showed that consumer prices increased less than expected in the year 2 November.
00:20The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics did not publish month-to-month CPI changes after the 43-day shutdown of the government prevented the collection of October data.
00:33The three major indexes rebounded from three-week lows.
00:37We had a pretty good sell-off in a lot of higher momentum, higher growth names, and obviously the results from one of the semiconductor companies last night, that's put a bid back into some of those companies.
00:48There's probably some short selling here, short covering, pardon me.
00:51But overall, I think the underlying trend for the market still remains positive.
00:55I think there's still more upside going into year-end and into the first quarter.
00:59But I think what's important here is the reaction by the market to those inflation numbers.
01:06And so far, it's been pretty good.
01:07I think everything that's been happening, not everything, some of the more important things that have happened recently is the 10-year bond yield has begun to back up.
01:16And so it was testing at a pretty important level around 4.2.
01:20And for us, from a technical standpoint, that's a really critical level.
01:24And the fact that rates have started to pull back here, I think, gives a bit of a bid to the market.
01:28The jobless claims report showed new applications fell last week, reversing the prior week's surge and suggesting labor market conditions remained stable in December.
01:38Earlier this week, an official jobs report showed U.S. job growth rebounded in November and the unemployment rate rose to 4.6%.
01:46Traders now see a 58% chance for a dovish policy move by the Fed in March, according to CME's FedWatch tool.
01:54Traders now see a 58% chance for a dovish policy move by the Fed in March, according to CME's Fed in March.
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