A weak May jobs report and the prospect for continued rate hikes didn’t go over big on Wall Street today, as the major indices all took a dive to end the week. The Dow Industrials dropped 93 points (-0.9%) to 10461, the S&P 500 lost 8 points (-0.7%) to 1196 and the Nasdaq fell 26 points (-1.3%) to 2071. The Russell 2000 lost 9 points (-0.8%) to 620, and the Dow Transports fell 0.6% while the Dow Utilities gained 0.2%. Bonds rallied after the morning jobs report, then sold off sharply the rest of the day, first pushing the 10-year yield down near 3.80%, but closing with the yield all the way back up at 3.98%. I wonder if today’s huge reversal will set the stage for higher yields over the next few weeks.
Market internals were negative, but volume stayed on the light side. Advances/declines were 6/7 on the NYSE and 5/8 on the Nasdaq. Up/down volume ran 3/5 on the NYSE and 2/7 on the Nasdaq. New highs/low came in at 198/24 on the NYSE and 82/26 on the Nasdaq.
There were a few winners on the day, those being HMOs (+1.3%), gold & silver stocks (+0.9%) and oil services (+0.8%). Losers were led by biotechs (-2.1%), computer hardware (-1.9%), internets (-1.7%), housing (-1.3%), semiconductors (-1.3%), retailers (-1.3%), disk drives (-1.1%) and networking (-1.0%).
Crude oil continued its cruise higher, gaining $1.40 today to $55.03/barrel. The dollar index moved up 0.3% in response to the higher bond yields, with the dollar index gaining 0.3% to 88.06. Gold edged up to $423/ounce.