Stock Market Today: March 18th - 22nd, 2024

Morning Lineup - 3/22/24 - Taking a Breather
Fri, Mar 22, 2024

Everything tends to move faster these days- except in sports where time seems to stand still. Did you watch the last four minutes of any of yesterday’s games? While the NCAA tournament is only just tipping off, the first Masters in Augusta started on this date in 1934. Today, because of TV and ratings, they don’t start the tournament until April after the college basketball champion has been crowned.

The Masters may have only been pushed out by a few weeks relative to when it first started in the 1930s, but the NHL’s Stanley Cup Championship is almost a summer event. Like the Masters, the puck was also dropped on the first Stanley Cup hockey Championship series on this day in 1894. These days, the playoffs (second season) don’t even start until the second half of April and last year, the Vegas Golden Knights didn’t clinch the cup until June 13th!

The markets are still as fast as ever, but this morning is quiet in terms of data. There’s no economic data on the calendar, and after a flurry of earnings reports after the close yesterday, no reports are hitting the tapes. That leaves investors with the opportunity to think about the barrage of central bank decisions that were released around the world over the last four days and ponder the fact that despite all of it, the S&P 500 is on pace for its best week of the year. That, or you can just enjoy the basketball, complain about your busted bracket, and wonder what if the refs hadn’t blown the whistle on a phantom foul at the end of the Kansas-Samford game.

Not only is the S&P 500 on pace for its best week of the year, but the stock markets of major global economies have been rallying in unison. As shown in the snapshot from our Trend Analyzer below, the ETFs of the G7 countries are all heading into the last trading day of the week at overbought or ‘extreme’ overbought levels. They’re all sitting on comfortable YTD gains with Japan and Italy both up over 10% while the UK trails the pack with a gain of ‘only’ 2.5%. The last five trading days have seen a similar pattern play out. Five of the seven country ETFs are all up over 1% in the last week, Germany has eked out a gain of 0.51% and Kentucky France is down 0.31%.

 

Here is a final look at today's market and futures maps, as well as how each sector performed individually at the close on Friday, March 22nd, 2024.

 

here is a quick preview of next week's notable earnings releases courtesy of reddit's wallstreetbets:

have yourself a terrific weekend ahead guys!