Market Update | May 12th - May 16th

This week was a super interesting one in the market! Let's go through a few important milestones.

U.S. & China Ease Trade Tensions

The week started with quite the bang! The U.S. and China had a meeting and agreed to temporarily lower tariffs, which are extra taxes on goods from other countries. As you are probably aware, tariffs have been plaguing the stock market all year, so the lowering on monday made investors feel more positive about the economy, and stocks jumped. Luckily, people started to worry less about a recession.

Big Milestone

The S&P 500, which you remember are a group of 500 big U.S. companies, officially climbed above where it started the year! That means it recovered all of its losses you heard about earlier this year.

Nvdia Boom

Tech giant Nvidia got a massive boost, rising over 16% this week after news broke that it signed a deal to sell its computer chips to the UAE. That helped lift the entire tech sector and made investors even more excited about the future of AI and semiconductors.

Inflation Cools Down

We got new inflation data from the Consumer Price Index which came in lower than expected. That's a sign that prices aren’t rising as fast anymore. That’s good news because it could mean the Fed won’t need to raise interest rates again and may even cut them.

Markets Hold Strong Despite Weak Consumer Sentiment

Even though a report showed that people are feeling less confident about the economy (called “consumer sentiment”), it didn’t stop the rally. Stocks stayed strong and ended the week on a high note.

The Data

What was the end result of the above events? Let's check the numbers:

S&P 500: 5.3%

Dow Jones: 3.4%

NASDAQ: 7.2%

Oil ($/barrel of crude oil): 1.3%

Gold (New York): –3.9%

Bitcoin: -0.6%

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