Wall Street edged higher in post-holiday trading

US stocks climbed on thin trading volume on Friday during the short post-Thanksgiving session, driven by gains in retail and a recovery in tech stocks.

Expectations of a rate cut by the Federal Reserve in December strengthened throughout the week, helping to bolster sentiment across equity markets.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.61% to 47,716.42 points, the S&P 500 rose 0.54% to 6,849.09 points and the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.65% to 23,365.69 points.

All major S&P 500 sectors were up, except healthcare, with pharmaceutical Eli Lilly down 2.6%.

Intel helped lead the S&P 500 with a 10.2% gain after an analyst at TF International Securities said the company would start shipping Apple’s lowest-end processors as early as 2027.

Indexes weekly profit, mixed for the month

All three major indices registered weekly gains. The S&P 500 rose 3.73%, the Nasdaq rose 4.91%, and the Dow gained 3.18%. The S&P and Dow turned marginally positive for the month after Friday’s price settlement.

But the Nasdaq closed down 1.51% this month, reflecting growing concerns about stretched AI and tech valuations, with investors taking profits and reducing exposure.

“This is a lighter volume post-holiday session, as it is accompanied by more activity,” said Cole Schmid, CEO of Schmid Capital Management. “But I think everyone has woken up in the last week to the fact that the outcome of AI is still very unknown.” Futures trading was temporarily disrupted in the morning following a CME Group outage that temporarily froze currency, commodities and equity contracts around the world.

CME’s stock futures offerings linked to US stocks typically trade heavily before US markets open, with investors relying on them to gauge trends and directions.

CME said it was due to cooling problems at its CyrusOne data centers.

Shares of CME Group were marginally higher.

“We were lucky today. It was such a low-volume day, but it could have had a much bigger impact,” said Joe Saluzzi, partner, co-founder and head of equity market structure research and co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading.

“It shows the risk of this failure and the connection to markets that could cause major problems.”

This week also marks the start of the holiday shopping season, which begins Thursday with Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday — critical sales days for big-box retailers.