A narrow Friday led by chips and crypto; futures rise on China talks
The S&P 500 rose 0.17% Friday while 62 of the 100 names we track fell. Micron closed above $1,000 and Coinbase jumped 11.66%. Futures are up on China talks.
The S&P 500 finished last week with a small gain, but it was carried by a narrow group: chipmakers and crypto-linked stocks rose sharply while most of the market slipped. This morning, futures are higher after Washington called weekend trade talks with Beijing a success, two days before China’s President Xi Jinping arrives for a state visit.
Friday: a gain on a narrow base
The S&P 500 rose 0.17% to 7,650.50 on Friday, the Nasdaq Composite 0.39% to 26,522.55, and the Dow fell 0.18% to 51,682.64, according to TheStreet. CNBC reported it was the Dow’s third straight losing week and its worst since March, in a week that included the Fed’s first rate hike in three years.
Underneath, breadth was weak. 62 of the 100 stocks and funds we track fell, and only 38 rose. QQQ, which tracks the Nasdaq-100, gained 0.63% to $721.45, while DIA lost 0.48% and IWM, the small-cap fund, 0.47%.
One number in our feed looks wrong but is not. SPY shows a 0.12% decline to $761.69 on a day the index it tracks rose. Friday was SPY’s quarterly ex-dividend date, with a distribution of about $1.89 per share, and the fund’s price drops by that amount mechanically. Adjusted for it, SPY rose roughly 0.13%, in line with the index. VOO, which tracks the same index, rose 0.11%.
Chips and crypto did the lifting
The semiconductor rally from Thursday kept going. Applied Materials (AMAT) rose 6.51% to $444.57 on about 14.3 million shares, after announcing a $5 billion investment in India over the next decade. Arm (ARM) gained 4.04%, Texas Instruments (TXN) 3.29%, Broadcom (AVGO) 2.97%, AMD 2.70% and Nvidia (NVDA) 1.34%.
Micron (MU) rose 3.92% to $1,015.80, closing above $1,000 a share, and traded at $1,017.75 after hours.
The exception inside the group was Qualcomm (QCOM), which fell 5.82% to $177.72 and was the worst performer in our feed. 24/7 Wall St. found no company announcement behind the move and described it as a month-long rally unwinding; the stock had gained about 12% over the past month. It shows that phone-chip makers are not trading with the AI data-centre names.
Crypto stocks had the biggest moves among large companies. Coinbase (COIN) jumped 11.66% to $194.25 and Robinhood (HOOD) 9.12% to $119.82. Strategy (MSTR) rose 16.35% to $153.91 in our movers feed. Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000 for the first time in two weeks, and the SEC announced a five-year exemption allowing certain platforms to handle trading in tokenized stocks, according to 24/7 Wall St. and Invezz.
Software, cybersecurity and Netflix gave ground
The other side of the week’s trade reversed. Cybersecurity stocks rallied hard last week on AI safety warnings, and CrowdStrike still finished the week up about 15%, per Yahoo Finance. But on Friday CrowdStrike (CRWD) fell 3.28%, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) 3.06% and Cloudflare (NET) 3.10%. Datadog (DDOG) lost 2.58%, ServiceNow (NOW) 2.17% and Salesforce (CRM) 2.03%. IBM fell 3.45%.
Netflix (NFLX) fell 4.67% to $71.79 on 114.3 million shares after Wells Fargo cut its rating to underweight, citing weaker engagement and a softer content slate, according to The Motley Fool and 24/7 Wall St. Meta (META) fell 2.43%.
This morning: China talks and cheaper oil
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday’s talks in New York with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were “a very successful engagement,” covering trade and AI, according to the Associated Press. The two countries have been discussing reciprocal tariff cuts on $30 billion of goods from each side. Xi’s state visit to Washington runs from September 23 to 25.
S&P 500 futures rose 0.3% and Nasdaq 100 futures 0.4% early Monday, Bloomberg reported. Oil fell for a fourth straight session, per Reuters, as more traffic moved through the Strait of Hormuz, though the strait remains largely closed: Brent crude dropped 2.1% to $101.65 a barrel and US crude 2.3% to $93.86, per AP. The 10-year Treasury yield was about 4.97%, just below the 5% it touched last week.
Asia followed the chip theme. South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.7% to 7,007.72, Taiwan’s Taiex 1.1%, the Shanghai Composite 1% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng 0.9%, per AP. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.56% at 638.98 early, with technology stocks up about 2% on chip-linked names, Reuters reported.
What to watch today
- Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee speaks on the economy and monetary policy at 5:30 a.m. ET.
- Chicago Fed National Activity Index, 7:30 a.m. ET. The prior reading was -0.08.
- About ten Fed appearances are scheduled this week, including Williams, Barkin, Hammack and Paulson, per Kiplinger and Newsquawk.
- Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, September 23 to 25.
- Costco reports earnings this week.
- Brent crude near $101.65 and the 10-year yield near 5%.
- Whether semiconductors and crypto stocks hold Friday’s gains at the open, and whether software extends Friday’s pullback.
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.