With a holiday-shortened week on both ends — both no trading yesterday, Christmas Day, as well as an early closing bell on Friday afternoon ahead of New Year’s holiday — we look at the final trading week of 2017 not so much as a big potential mover as a closer-outer of a tremendously successful year for the stock market indexes. Look at the one-year charts for the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 and witness things of beauty.
The Dow 30, if you recall, was sub-20K at this time last year, and now rests just a couple hundred points below 25K. The S&P 500 has raced up more than 400 points from roughly 2260 to 2680 from a year ago. And the Nasdaq, with its relative volatility in an historically non-volatile market, came out of Christmas season last year under 5500 and now looks to tip the 7000 mark. Even without other “get rich quick” schemes like bitcoin investing, this has been a remarkable year for investors.
And the news just keeps getting better from here: ahead of today’s opening bell, MasterCard’s MA Spending Pulse read on holiday sales demonstrates notable gains for retailers and in consumer confidence: +4.9% year over year (+18.1% in e-commerce sales), consisting of holiday shopping season designated from November through Christmas Eve. This is the biggest year-over-year gain in holiday spending since 2011.
All in all, we can expect slower trading volume as many investors take a well-earned vacation ahead of what looks to be another big year in the stock market for 2018. Perhaps we’ll see a bit of profit-taking, but so far there’s not much evidence of an appetite to take money out of the market.
Apple Estimates for iPhone X Down
If we’re looking at anything this week with a little extra trepidation, it is the lower estimates for iPhone sales. Apple’s AAPL iPhone X does not appear to be seeing the same demand as it had a few years back with the iPhone 6. Increased competition — not only from competitors but from Apple’s own iPhone 8 and 8+, which hit the market right around the same time as the $999 iPhone X did — and weaker demand in key economic regions like China have helped ratchet down estimates for Apple’s top line.
This, however, comes just as Barron’s made its latest cover story that Apple Inc. is looking in 2018 to become the first-ever $1 trillion dollar company by market cap. Currently, Apple is worth roughly $884 billion, still the largest single company in the world.
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