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published on July 27, 2020 - 1:27 PM
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(AP) — Stocks resumed their upward march on Wall Street Monday, while the price of gold rushed to a record high at the start of a week packed with potentially market-moving events. The S&P 500 rose 0.7% following mixed, modest moves in overseas markets. This week’s headline event may be a two-day meeting for the Federal Reserve on interest rates that begins Tuesday. It’s also a heavy week for earnings reports, and Congress is debating more aid for the economy. Nervousness is still hanging over markets, which helped gold briefly shoot above $1,940 per ounce for the first time.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story appears below.
Wall Street is resuming its rise on Monday, while gold rushes to a record at the start of a week packed with potentially market-moving events.

The S&P 500 was 0.6% higher in late trading following mixed, modest moves for stocks overseas. Hopes that Congress can strike a deal on more aid for the economy helped to lift stocks, but nervousness was still hanging over markets. Gold shot above $1,940 per ounce to touch its highest-ever price.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 51 points, or 0.2%, at 26,521, as of 3:02 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was up 1.5%.

“If there ever was a week to pay attention, this is likely the one,” Kevin Giddis, chief fixed income strategist at Raymond James, wrote in a report. “There is as much going on for the markets as there has been since the crisis began, and almost all of it has some potential meaning on the future of the US economy.”

At the head of the pack is a two-day meeting for the Federal Reserve on interest rates that begins Tuesday. The Fed helped catapult markets higher in March, with the S&P 500 erasing nearly all of its earlier 34% drop, after promising to keep interest rates at their record lows and to buy a wide range of bonds in order to support the economy. Investors this week are waiting to hear how the Fed sees the economy progressing in upcoming months, as well as what it plans to do on interest rates.

This week is also a busy one for corporate earnings, with more than a third of the companies in the S&P 500 scheduled to report how they fared form April through June.

So far, profit reports have been better than Wall Street was expecting, though still far weaker than a year earlier because of the recession.

Companies that have reported results topping analysts’ expectations, though, have been getting a smaller bump than usual versus the rest of the market the following day, BofA Global Research analysts wrote in a report.

What’s more important, the analysts say, is what CEOs and companies say about their prospects going forward, rather than how they did over the last three months.

Several of the market’s most influential companies are scheduled to report this week, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s parent company. These four companies alone make up nearly 16% of the S&P 500 by market value, which gives their stocks’ movements outsized influence on the index.

Such stocks have cruised higher through much of the pandemic on expectations that they can continue to grow regardless of whether the economy is quarantined. But critics say their stocks have bubbled up too high, even after accounting for the huge profits that the companies produce.

Big tech-oriented stocks stumbled last week on such concerns, and they helped to pull the S&P 500 to its first weekly loss in four weeks. The index is about 4.5% below its record set in February.

Worries about an uptick in layoffs across the country also hurt stocks last week, as businesses close down again amid rising coronavirus counts across much of the Sun Belt. An extra $600 in weekly federal unemployment benefits is set to expire soon, and Congress is still arguing about how to offer more aid for the economy.

The Trump administration’s chief negotiators spent the weekend on Capitol Hill working on a relief bill, but Democrats and Republicans still have much to negotiate.

Investors are optimistic about the impending stimulus coming out of Congress and they are expecting that it could be even greater than the current $1 trillion amount that is being floated,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA. “In order for the Democrats to come onboard, it could end up being double that amount.”

All the uncertainty about the economy, the pandemic and how long interest rates will remain at close to zero have helped drive the price of gold higher, making it the best performing investment of 2020. More recently, worries about rising tensions between the United States and China and a weaker U.S. dollar have given gold an extra boost.

Gold for delivery in August added another $33.50 to settle at $1,931.00 per ounce Monday, after earlier climbing as high as $1,941.90. That’s an intraday record for the most actively traded contract, and it follows up on Friday’s record high for a settlement price.

It’s unusual for the price of gold, which tends to rise when worries about the economy are high, to do so well at the same as stocks, which tend to wilt under such worries, said Mark Hackett, chief of investment research for Nationwide.

“It’s a tug of war between those investors and they’re really not acting in a normal way,” Hackett said. “But it’s 2020, nothing’s normal.”

In the stock market, big tech stocks were pulling indexes higher as they resumed their winning ways. Apple rose 2.1%, and Amazon gained 1.9%.

Health care stocks were also strong, but trading was mixed. More than 40% of stocks in the S&P 500 were lower, with banks taking some of the heaviest losses.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note ticked up to 0.60% from 0.58% late Friday.

Benchmark U.S. crude rose 31 cents to settle at $41.60 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 7 cents to $43.41 a barrel.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.2%, South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.8% and stocks in Shanghai added 0.3%. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong lost 0.4%.

In Europe, Germany’s DAX was close to flat, and France’s CAC 40 lost 0.3%. The FTSE 100 in London dipped 0.3%.


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