News

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

Markets were tepid today, leading into the mid-week holiday. The good news is, all major indices closed in the green. The Dow enjoyed its second-straight session up at the close, +56 points or +0.15%, while the S&P 500 rose +0.25%, the index’s 31st record-high close this year so far.

The small-cap Russell 2000 split the difference today, +0.19%, while the Nasdaq — still leading all indices for the week, month, year to date and last year — gained a scant +5 points, +0.03%. This can be attributed directly to NVIDIA’s NVDA +3.5% increase today. NVIDIA literally tipped the Nasdaq into the green, and a fresh all-time closing high to 17,862.

Further, NVIDIA once again surpassed Microsoft MSFT in market cap today, reaching a level of $3.34 trillion and making it the most valuable company in the world at present. The GPU innovator and leader in A.I. data center business added today’s +3.5% to +45% growth in just the past four weeks, +181% year to date and +209% over the past year. As the company’s forecasts continue to be written higher and higher, NVIDIA still carried a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

During the course of today’s session, we saw a couple economic reports. Business Inventories for April came in-line with expectations at +0.3%, from an unrevised -0.1% reported the previous month. Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) made its forecast for 2024 and beyond: -$1.9 trillion for this year, -$2.0 trillion for 2025 and looking out to 2034 at -$2.8T. Big numbers though these clearly are, it’s interesting to think that NVIDIA could cover them all by itself.

After today’s close, KB Home KBH is out with fiscal Q2 results. Earnings of $2.50 per share easily surpassed the $1.78 in the Zacks consensus, and swinging to a positive year over year from $1.94 per share reported in the year-ago quarter. Revenues of $1.71 billion nicely outshone the consensus $1.64 billion expected. Its average selling price for a new home reached $483K, higher than the $479.5K reported a year ago. Net orders were up +2% year over year, but Deliveries were -4% in the quarter, with earnings and sales guidance to be discussed on the conference call.

We’ll take a break from trading tomorrow, in observance of the Juneteenth holiday. When we return on Thursday, new Jobless Claims will be joined by Housing Starts and Permits, Philly Fed manufacturing and the Q2 U.S. Current Account, which is expected to tip to a deeper deficit into the -$200 billions. On Friday, PMI prints on Manufacturing and Services join Existing Home Sales and Leading Economic Indicators to close out the week. So while we’re on the summer schedule, we do see what might be some interesting data points.

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