Day Traders Diary

11/18/24

The major averages closed mixed to start the week as tech continues to shine led by Tesla and ahead of Nvidia's earnings this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 55 points, or 0.13%. The S&P 500 rose 23 points or 0.39% while the Nasdaq rose 111 points or 0.6%.

Tesla was up 5% on a Bloomberg News report, citing sources, that President-elect Donald Trump's team is working on ways to ease regulation on self-driving vehicles. Besides Tesla, Apple, Google and most of the chip stocks were higher. Nvidia was one of the few tech stocks lower ahead of earnings. Nvidia was down on a report that their next generation chip, Blackwell overheats when connected together in servers.

Beyond Nvidia, investors await a batch of earnings from the retail sector later this week.

So far about 93% of S&P 500 companies have reported results so far. More than 74% have topped earnings expectations and 62% have surpassed revenue estimates, according to FactSet.

In other news, CVS Health shares popped 5% after agreeing to add four new board members.

In the commodity space, oil was up 3%, gold was up nearly 2% and Bitcoin rose 2%.

Monday's moves follow a tough week for the three major benchmarks, now off the highs seen in the aftermath of Trump's election victory. That sell-off was driven by concerns about the path for interest rates after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell following central bank comments they are in no hurry to cut rates.