Wall St. surges on Brexit deal, stimulus hope; S&P 500 ends week in red ink

On Thursday, in a holiday-shortened thin volume trading session, all three key indices of Wall St. had eked out modest gains as investors were preparing to leave their trading desks ahead of a long Christmas weekend, while a Brexit trade deal reached on Thursday evening alongside optimisms over a $892 billion in pandemic stimulus package had shored up market participants’ appetite for riskier assets.

Alongside this, as pandemic vaccine candidates of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were authorized for emergency usage in a majority of G7 economies including the US and UK, hopes of a brighter 2021 added to further optimisms.

Nonetheless, as a chaotic Brexit was averted in the Christmas eve after policymakers from EU and UK had stamped a narrow trade deal, markets’ focus was largely spiralling over a $892 billion pandemic stimulus plan that the US President Donald Trump had declined to sign citing expenses in national security.

Nonetheless, the pandemic stimulus deal has been expected to become a law on next Monday following a re-voting of the proposal in the US Senate, raising hopes of a quicker-than-anticipated rebound in economic activities.

Wall St. gains, but S&P ends week in negative territory

Citing statistics, in the day’s Wall Street closing bell, trade-sensitive Dow added 0.23 per cent to 30,199.87 and benchmark S&P 500 rose by 0.35 per cent to 3,703.06, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.26 per cent to round off the session at 12,804.73.

Nonetheless, on the holiday-shortened week, Dow alongside Nasdaq had registered a marginal weekly percentage gain, while S&P 500 had winded down the week in red inks. Meanwhile, adding that a Brexit trade deal would more likely to act as a market buffer, had a pandemic stimulus bill been delayed further, a Chief Market Economist at Spartan Capital Securities in New York, Peter Cardillo said, “If (stimulus) doesn’t get passed in some form or another it could mean severe consequences for the unemployed.

(The Brexit deal) might be acting as a buffer for the market in the sense that it’s counteracting the negativity of the stimulus bill being stalled”.

Source: https://www.financial-world.org/news/news/stock_markets/6920/wall-st-surges-on-brexit-deal-stimulus-hope-sampp-500-ends-week-in-red-ink/