Wall Street found some relief on Friday as major stock indexes bounced from a brutal week of selling — but markets are still poised to end lower for the sixth consecutive week.
Rattled by a surprisingly stiff monthly inflation number and a cataclysmic selloff in cryptocurrencies this week, investors have grown increasingly concerned whether Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell will be able to engineer a soft landing for the US economy with a series of rate hikes in the coming months.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday rose more than 450 points, or 1.47%, to 32,195.50 and the Nasdaq rose 4% as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. Both indexes are also headed for weekly losses.
The S&P 500 was up 2.67%. The benchmark index is still on track for its sixth straight losing week, something that hasn’t happened since 2011.
Technology stocks led the gains. Apple rose 2.1% and Microsoft rose 2%.
The sector has been behind much of the broader market’s volatility throughout the week and has been slipping overall as higher interest rates tend to weigh most heavily on the priciest stocks.
Retailers and communications companies also made solid gains. Amazon jumped 3.6% and Google’s parent rose 2.3%.
Jordan Waldrep, the chief information officer for Dallas-based TrueMark Investments, told The Post that the market slide is the result of a confluence of factors that together make up a perfect storm — inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supply chain disruptions, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“Put it all together and you are vulnerable to a correction,” Waldrep told The Post.
“Vulnerable enough to turn the ship and start a sell off.”
When asked if there’s light at the end of the tunnel for investors, Waldrep said that while he was optimistic for the long term, Wall Street could expect to see more turbulence in the near future.
“I don’t know if we are experiencing an orderly correction or the start of something larger,” he said.
“To date, the selloff has been fairly orderly but we have yet to see a real blow out trading day with increased volatility and massive volumes that often marks the end of these corrections.”
Waldrep said that the Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates “pushed the market to take some of the air out of the balloon.”
“As painful as this has been for investors, I think it has been a healthy selloff to date,” he said. “I’d like to see the market find some footing and start to rebuild from these levels.”
Mark Andraos, an associated portfolio manager at Regency Wealth Management, told The Post that the selloff was the result of the stock market “pricing in significant uncertainty as to whether the Fed can engineer a soft landing and not tip the economy into recession.”
“The silver lining is that corporate earnings have been strong and stock market valuations are more attractive than they were pre-pandemic, setting up selective opportunities to add to high quality companies that have sold off,” he said.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
