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Market Review:
Bullish Monday Moves
In the daily market review with TheLFB trade team, Dan Cook, Snr Market Analyst at IG Markets, looks at the impact of the first Wall Street session to finish in the green after positive futures trade, for over a week of trade. Catch Dan, and TheLFB trade team on ForexTV Live.
So far February trading feels a lot better than January did, at least from a Bulls perspective. All three major US equity indices posted gains in excess of 1% today. The Dow soared 118.20 points to finish the first day of February at 10185.53. The S&P gained 15.32 to close at 1089.19. The NASDAQ picked up 23.85 to end the session at 2171.2.
As opposed to last month when other events drove traders attention away from earnings and fundamentals, today those are exactly the items it appears traders decided to focus on.
The Institute for Supply Management started off the day by posting a much stronger than expected Manufacturing PMI level of 58.4. What really stood out was that 9 out of 10 categories which make up this index all showed growth in January. Two very closely watched readings, Production and Employment, showed very positive growth coming in with improvements of 6.5% and 3.1%, respectively.
The Employment reading in particular carried a lot of weight as we start a week that is very heavy in macroeconomic reports related to the US labor market. This report really helped to boost the Industrial sector with names like Alcoa and DuPont shares surging after the ISM data was released.
On the earnings side, oil behemoth Exxon Mobil reported that net income fell by 23% in the 4th quarter as rising oil prices combined with a weak demand for fuel took its toll on the refining business. Even so, this loss was not as severe as expected and the reported earnings per share of $1.27 beat street estimates by $0.08 and sent XOM shares up almost 2-3/4% in trading today.
On tomorrow’s docket we have the Pending Home Sales report on the macroeconomic side and on the earnings front there will be another 105 companies reporting. One of the big names to watch tomorrow will be Cisco which reports at the market close.