Market Update | August 24th - August 30th

Welcome back to another market update! Today, we'll go over the usual indexes and then take a look at what happened that affected the market this past week.

Let's start with the Dow Jones, which went up about .95% over the week showing strong pushes to all time highs. next, the S&P 500 just barely beat the Dow Jones growing 1%. Last but not least, the Nasdaq index grew 1.1%, beating both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500. Although it grew the least, the Dow Jones was the only index out of the big 3 to reach an all time high last week.

Next, we can take a look at commodities. To start, gold rose around 2 percent, and Silver fell around 1 percent. Overall, metals had very little movement. On the other hand, oil prices fell close to 3% representing high losses in the market.

Finally, Crypto. The mother of Crypto, Bitcoin, took a heavy hit losing over 5% of its value. Because of this, the rest of the Crypto market took a rather large tumble. Xrp, Solana, and Ethereum all fell with Bitcoin over 5%!

What Influenced the Market this Week?

On Thursday, Nvidia released its earnings statement. This earnings statement wasn't any regular one. Nvidia is the largest company in the world by market cap, meaning its earnings can influence the entire market. Some estimates had the market swinging 3% in either direction based of if they beat their earnings. Thankfully, Nvidia beat their earnings. However, this didn't stop the stock from dropping over 4% the next day. Why did that happen if they beat earnings? Well, Nvidia has beat their earnings for their past 8 earnings report. By this point, everyone pretty much expects Nvidia to beat their earnings, so when they beat their earnings, nobody gets excited. Even though the stock went down, Nvidia beating their earnings shows the market that the AI race is very much real and will be around for a long time.

Inflation?

Core PCE is the Federal Reserve’s preferred way of measuring the rise and fall of inflation because it doesn't count outliers such as volatile food and energy prices. The PCE tells investors how much prices are rising for everyday spending categories. Ultimately, the PCE was released and came in at 2.9% year-over-year, slightly above the prior month’s 2.8%. This marked the highest reading since February 2025. The market reaction was cautious. The S&P dipped about 0.6% and the Nasdaq dropped over 1% as data showed services inflation was still sticky. Additionally, this complicated hopes that the Fed will cut interest rates sooner, though investors still expected a cut in September with nearly 90% probability.

GDP Estimate?

On August 28th, a second GDP Estimate for Q2 2025 was released. the advanced estimate was raised .3% from 3.0% to 3.3%. This reflected firmer consumer spending and business investment. Stocks edged higher on Thursday as a result.