Starting off the shortened week, both the bulls and bears had their way with the S&P 500 index futures, with neither side cementing any significant progress.
As is typical, the shortened Sunday-Monday overnight session was fairly quiet, with no significant swings in the index futures. By early premarket trading on Tuesday morning, the bulls were trying to maintain a bid just below the 5340 level during Fed Gov. Bowman and Fed Pres. Mester’s speeches in Japan, but were unable to hold onto the gains.
By the open of the regular session, the index futures were in the green by less than 10 handles, and soon retreated below last week’s closing level (5321.50). At 8:00am EDT, May’s consumer confidence survey results were revealed, coming in 6% above expectations at 102. This seemed to give the bulls some confidence as they started to push the index futures slowly back up into the green. Just after the lunch hour ended, support started to give way and the bears started to make new intraday lows. Once the premarket low was breached, the pace of the decline accelerated. From there, it was nearly straight down to the 5297 area, where the bulls were finally able to make a stand.
After reclaiming some of the day’s losses, the bulls instigated a late-day rally in the last 10 minutes of the session once closing imbalances were in, bringing the index futures all the way back up into the green. The session concluded just above mid-range on the day at 5324.75, making a slight advance of 3.25 handles. This also marked the seventh close in the 5320~5333 area out of the last nine sessions.
Among the top components of the index, NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) continued its post-earnings rally and emerged as the biggest gainer. The company was also assisted by the announcement of Elon Musk’s plans to build a supercomputer for xAI using NVIDIA’s chips. For the day, the chip designer was able to advance by $75.90 or 7.13% to close at $1140.59, marking new all-time and all-time closing highs for the issue.
For those looking for dalmatian-like outperformers, NVIDIA’s gain was over 101 times the cash index’s advance of 0.07%.
On the other hand, the biggest loser ended up being Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA). For the day, the EV maker declined by $2.49 or 1.39% to close at $176.75.
