S&P 500 (VOO) Live: Alphabet Up, Market Down But Improving Already
Key Points
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The S&P 500 opened lower Friday, threatening to break a three-day winning streak.
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President Trump told Time magazine he expects the trade war to continue for another year, and end with average tariffs on imports of 20% to 50%.
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Google parent Alphabet reported strong earnings last night, while Intel reported a loss and issued a sales warning for Q2.
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All's Well That Ends Green
All three major market indices ended in the green Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up a bare 0.05%, while the S&P 500 gained a more substantial 0.7%, and the Nasdaq closed up 1.2% gain.
Despite an inauspicious start on Monday, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF’s gain of 0.7% Friday brought its total gain for the week to 4.6%.
For the month of April, however, the Voo remains down 1.5%, with just three trading days remaining.
Call It "the Trump Effect"
Markets have turned solidly green in afternoon trading, with the S&P 500 up 0.66% and the Voo ETF ticking right along in its footsteps with a 0.64% gain. So what’s changed?
Responding to China’s demurral yesterday that “there are absolutely no negotiations on the economy and trade between China and the U.S.,” which was itself in response to President Trump’s assertion Tuesday that talks were happening, the President insisted again today that, whatever the Chinese government may want people to believe, “we’ve been meeting with China” to talk about lowering tariffs after all.
In this game of he said, Xi said, it’s honestly hard for an investor to know what’s really going on. But for now at least, the markets seem to believe Mr. Trump, and are hoping the trade war is nearing an end.
S&P 500 Just Turned Into a Horse of a Different Color
Uh-oh. We’re 15 minutes from noonday now, and the S&P 500 has just turned red, down 0.12%. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, likewise, has lost its pleasant shade of green, and is now down 0.14%.
In happier news (for investors), Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO) just won a ruling in Texas, where an Outsourcing Facilities Association lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the FDA suing them for making Ozempic copycat drugs just got rejected. S&P 500 component Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) previously won a similar ruling, also in Texas. For the big publicly-traded GLP-1 drugmakers, things are finally going their way.
S&P Might Not Bounce Back This Time
In mid-morning trading, we’re getting further disturbing news that may weigh on “the Voo.” CNBC reports that S&P 500 component Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), or more precisely third party retailers who sell on Amazon, are raising prices on hundreds of items to help them absorb the cost of new tariffs imposed by President Trump.
Amazon’s stock price doesn’t seem to be suffering from the report yet. It’s still slightly in the green. But the S&P 500 isn’t moving any higher, despite trading having begun nearly an hour and a half ago already.
And we’re off! The stock market opened for trading a bit lower today than it left off last night. But within five minutes of opening, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) was already, if only barely, in the green with an 0.06% gain. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA: VOO), which closely tracks the performance of the index, is up 0.09%.
It’s still a hesitant start, but a logical result in light of comments from President Trump, just published by Time magazine, to the effect that the President is looking to end his trade war with China (and the world) perhaps “a year from now” and with tariffs on foreign countries settling at “20% to 50%.”
The prospect of trade war volatility dragging on for another 12 months, and of tariffs ending up two to five times higher than the 10% “reciprocal” tariffs already announced, is clearly not something that investors wanted to hear.
Earnings
Last night, after the close of trading on a third straight day of gains for “the Voo,” index component Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) (Nasdaq: GOOGL) reported earnings a staggering 40% better than Wall Street analysts were predicting, which seemed propitious enough news to keep the stock market rally going this morning. Unfortunately, comments from Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) seem to have canceled out Alphabet’s good news. The chipmaker reported a $0.19 per share loss for its own first quarter, warned that it’s not going to earn a profit in Q2 either (at best, Intel might break even), and its Q2 sales will be about $1 billion less than analysts had forecast.
This mixed messaging on the earnings front, for two of the country’s biggest tech companies, is also weighing on the market today.
Analyst Calls
Perhaps unlucky for them, Wall Street analysts seem not to have had an opportunity to review the President’s comments before issuing their latest round of upgrades this morning. Citigroup for example is starting the day off with an upgrade of Hasbro (Nasdaq: HAS) stock, while KeyBanc is upgrading both Lowes (NYSE: LOW) and La-Z-Boy (NYSE: LZB) — all three of which companies are highly dependent upon goods imported from abroad.
If the trade war keeps rumbling, and tariffs keep climbing, things could turn ugly for all of these stocks, and for the S&P 500 in general.
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