Day Traders Diary

9/11/18

The U.S. equity market has taken off following a slow start to today's session, extending Monday's rebound. The S&P 500 was down as much as 0.4% earlier, but is now up 0.5%, hovering near its best mark of the day. Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 0.6%, and the blue-chip Dow is also higher by 0.6%.

Energy shares are leading the charge, helped by a rebound in crude prices; WTI crude futures are up 2.6% at $69.28/bbl, looking to end a five-session slide. Crude prices have been supported by potential supply disruptions related to Hurricane Florence, which could impact the Colonial Pipeline that connects Houston to New York when it makes landfall in the Carolinas later this week. The S&P 500's energy sector is up 1.2%.

Meanwhile, the top-weighted information technology sector (+0.9%) is also outperforming, helped by FAANG names like Facebook (FB 166.69, +2.51), Apple (AAPL 223.46, +5.09), and Netflix (NFLX 353.80, +5.39), which are up between 1.5% and 2.3%. Amazon (AMZN 1966.66, +27.65), another FAANG name, is up 1.4%, helping to underpin the consumer discretionary group (+0.7%).

At the opposite end of the leaderboard, the consumer staples (-0.2%) and utilities (-0.4%) groups are the only two spaces (out of 11) in negative territory.

In trade-related news, China will reportedly ask the World Trade Organization this month for permission to impose sanctions on the U.S. for failure to comply with a 2016 ruling that found some of its anti-dumping rules to be illegal. That headline weighed on stocks earlier, but investors appear to have brushed it off since.

Looking at other markets, U.S. Treasuries are under pressure, sending yields higher across the curve, with the benchmark 10-yr yield up three basis points at 2.97%, which marks a one-month high. In currencies, the U.S. Dollar Index is slightly higher, up 0.1% at 95.18.

Reviewing today's economic data, which included July Wholesale Inventories, the July Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and the August NFIB Small Business Optimism Index:

• July Wholesale Inventories rose 0.6% (Briefing.com consensus +0.7%). The June reading was left unrevised at +0.1%.
  • The key takeaway from the report is that the pace of sales growth year-over-year continues to exceed the pace of inventories growth, which is a positive dynamic that can eventually help wholesalers regain pricing power if it persists.
• The July Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that job openings increased to 6.939 million from a revised 6.822 million (from 6.662 million) in June.
• The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index for August increased to 108.8 from 107.9 in July.

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  • Headlines provided by Briefing.com