Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
NYSE
The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded higher Thursday as investors looked to recover from an early year slump.
The 30-stock rose 121 points, or 0.3%, to retrace its loss of nearly 300 points from the day before. The S&P 500 edged 0.1% higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, on the other hand, dipped 0.1%, adding to its more than 1% loss from Wednesday’s dismal trading session.
Mega-cap tech stocks such as Apple are underperforming to start the year, as overstretched valuations and uncertainty around when the Federal Reserve will begin to cut rates have investors worried that markets have gotten overly optimistic.
Apple stock is down more than 5% this week. Shares of the tech giant fell 1% on Thursday following a downgrade by Piper Sandler, two days after Barclays also lowered its rating on the name.
The recent performance on Wall Street comes in stark contrast to how the market ended 2023. The S&P 500 ended last year up more than 24% while enjoying its best weekly win streak going back to 2004.
But Steven Wieting, chief investment strategist of Citi Global Wealth, doesn’t believe that the recent pullback will have many long-term repercussions on the market.
“Whether any of this lasts, I wouldn’t really look to the last few days as mattering very much,” he told CNBC. “It’s really a statistical coin toss.”
In fact, Wieting believes the S&P 500 could end the year around the 5,000 level, which would indicate a 6% upside from here.