The holiday shortened trading week closed with gains across the developed markets. The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 were especially thankful as they marked new all-time highs Wednesday, ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
While the domestic large cap indices set new records, the greatest weekly gains were seen in the small cap stocks. The S&P 600 Small Cap Growth Index added 2.69% last week, doubling the performance of the S&P 500 Growth Index. However, Small Cap is between 5 and 10 percent behind its Large Cap peers year to date.
At the sector level, 10 out of 11 sectors closed either flat or higher. Energy was the only sector that closed substantially lower last week. With less than four weeks of trade remaining this year, it remains the largest underperforming sector for 2019.
At the commodity level, both crude oil and natural gas experienced significant declines last week. But year to date, the two primary segments of the S&P GSCI Energy Index could not look more different.
Lastly, President Trump signed the bipartisan Hong Kong Human Rights Declaration Law on the eve of Thanksgiving. This served as a Thanksgiving present to protesters in Hong Kong but added new uncertainty to the “Phase One” US/China Trade deal.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/28/asia/hong-kong-reaction-trump-legislation-intl-hnk/index.html
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The S&P 500® Index is a capitalization index of 500 stock-designed to measure performance of the broad domestic economy through changes in the aggregate market value of stock representing all major industries.
https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-500
The Dow Jones Industrial Average® (The Dow®), is a price-weighted measure of 30 U.S. blue-chip companies. The index covers all industries except transportation and utilities.
https://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/dow-jones-industrial-average
The NASDAQ Composite Index measures all NASDAQ domestic and international based common type stocks listed on The NASDAQ Stock Market. Today the NASDAQ Composite includes over 2,500 companies, more than most other stock market indexes. Because it is so broad-based, the Composite is one of the most widely followed and quoted major market indexes
https://indexes.nasdaqomx.com/Index/Overview/COMP
The MSCI World Index, which is part of The Modern Index Strategy, is a broad global equity benchmark that represents large and mid-cap equity performance across 23 developed markets countries. It covers approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country and MSCI World benchmark does not offer exposure to emerging markets.
The MSCI Emerging Markets (EM) Index is designed to represent the performance of large- and mid-cap securities in 24 Emerging Markets countries of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As of December 2017 it had more than 830 constituents and covered approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country.
The S&P GSCI Crude Oil index provides investors with a reliable and publicly available benchmark for investment performance in the crude oil market.
https://us.spindices.com/indices
Companies in the S&P 500 Sector Indices are classified based on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®).
https://us.spindices.com/indices