Wall Street is trading higher in thin post-holiday trading

U.S. stocks rose in thin trading volume Friday in a shortened post-Thanksgiving session, driven by retail gains and a rebound in technology stocks. Expectations for a Federal Reserve rate cut in December strengthened throughout the week, supporting stock market sentiment.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.61% to 47,716.42 points, the S&P 500 gained 0.54% to 6,849.09 points and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.65% to 23,365.69 points.All major sectors of the S&P 500 rose except healthcare, while Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals fell 2.6%.

Intel helped the S&P 500 with a 10.2% gain after a TF International Securities analyst said the company would ship Apple’s cheapest M processor as early as 2027.

INDEXES WATCH WEEKLY PROFIT, MIXED FOR A MONTH The three major indices posted weekly gains. The S&P 500 rose 3.73%, the Nasdaq gained 4.91% and the Dow Jones rose 3.18%. The S&P and Dow Jones turned marginally positive this month after prices settled on Friday. But the Nasdaq closed 1.51% lower this month, reflecting growing concerns about overvalued AI and technology, with investors taking profits and reducing their exposure.

“This is a low-volume post-holiday session, as is often the case, with not much activity,” said Cole Smead, CEO of Smead Capital Management. “But I think everyone has woken up in recent weeks to the fact that the outcome of AI is still very unknown.” Futures trading was temporarily disrupted in the morning after a CME Group outage temporarily frozen currencies, commodities and stock contracts around the world.

CME’s stock futures offering tied to U.S. stocks is typically heavily traded before U.S. markets open, with investors relying on it to gauge trends and directions.

CME said this was due to a cooling problem in its CyrusOne data centers.

Shares of CME Group were marginally higher.

“We’re lucky today. It was one of those low-volume days, but it could have had a much bigger impact,” said Joe Saluzzi, partner, co-founder and head of stock market structure research and co-head of equities trading at Themis Trading.

“It does highlight the risk of these failures and the disconnect with the markets that could cause bigger problems.”

This week also marked the start of the holiday shopping season, starting with Thanksgiving on Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday – crucial sales days for big box retailers.