03 September 2024

The S&P 500's Summer Ends with Index Nearing Record High

An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull getting excited as the S&P 500 gets close to setting a new record high. Image generated with Microsoft Copilot Designer.

The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) reached the end of Summer 2024 on the verge of reaching a new record high. The index closed out the final week of August 2024 at 5,648.40, just 18.8 points (0.3%) below its all-time record high close it set on 16 July 2024.

Part of what makes that remarkable is the share of the index' market capitalization claimed by its top 10 component stocks shrank during the last two months. Our summer snapshot found these stocks represented nearly 35.8% of the entire value of the index. Two months later, their share of the index' total valuation has fallen to just over 34.0%.

That's the conveyance effect in action, in which investors taken their gains from top-flying stocks like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and are rotating into other stocks within the index, boosting their relative valuations.

With respect to the dividend futures-based model's alternative futures chart, that was enough to keep the trajectory of the index close to the top end of the latest redzone forecast range on the chart, as expected. Here's the latest update of the chart:

Alternative Futures - S&P 500 - 2024Q3 - Standard Model (m=+1.5 from 9 March 2023) - Snapshot on 30 Aug 2024

Overall, it was a slow news week following the previous week's major events, which was also to be expected ahead of the long U.S. Labor Day holiday weekend. Here are the market-moving headlines from the week that was:

Monday, 26 August 2024
Tuesday, 27 August 2024
Wednesday, 28 August 2024
Thursday, 29 August 2024
Friday, 30 August 2024

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool forecast was unchanged. It continues to anticipate the Fed will hold the Federal Funds Rate steady in its current target range of 5.25-5.50% until 18 September (2024-Q3). On that date, the Fed is expected to start a series of 0.25%-0.50% rate cuts that will occur at six-week intervals well into 2025.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's projection of the real GDP growth rate for the current quarter of 2024-Q3 rebounded to +2.5% from the previous week's projection of +2.0% growth.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull getting excited as the S&P 500 gets close to setting a new record high".