Let's bring in the one and only Michael Ryan King, senior market strategist here at the stock exchange.
Fresh round of all-time highs.
There's a lot of noise and things going on in the background.
Overarchingly speaking, Michael, what's driving it?
Yes, well, I mean, the big picture, it's AI, it's earnings revisions moving higher, right?
And so you know, as you pointed out earlier, we're up for 6 consecutive weeks, right?
Traders have really had to have, you know, do some mental gymnastics over the last 6 weeks as we've rallied, kind of starting on.
March 30th and now push to fresh all-time highs.
The S&P 500 tag 7400 earlier today, right?
But what, you know, like you have to deal with this cognitive cognitive dissonance right where you're weighing the move higher in energy prices and the potential negative outcomes related to Iran, but that's being completely overweighed and overshadowed by the CE spending boom that we're seeing, uh, and that's really driving kind of gains in.
Technology for this week for the first time this year we saw the market cap weighted S&P 500 is now outperforming the equal cap weighted S&P 500.
Yes, interesting, and we have a lot of these sessions where like equal weight tech still does very well relative to its peers.
So interesting rotation.
What have you seen, not just for today's tape because we're kind of working a little bit of an inverse between semis and software.
Been a really interesting last five days here on the street for those two sectors.
Yes, so semiconductors.
The winner of the week, the year, right, up over 10% for this week, 70% for the year for the IC semiconductor index.
Now throughout the year we've seen kind of software really underperforming, right?
That's been on the back of this AI disruption, um, you know, kind of vibe coding, uh, you know, kind of fears that have been out there this week.
We did see a couple of positive earnings reports within semiconductor uh within uh software, right?
So we saw software stocks up about 5% for this week.
Fortnet was a. stand out, which really helped to drive the cybersecurity names which have been under some significant pressure.
Let me get your take on the April jobs report.
Maybe a bit of a mixed bag.
Stronger on the top line, 115 for the month than had been expected.
Unemployment still at 4.3%, about expected, but average hourly earnings for the month and annualized, both a little bit weaker.
Maybe there's something in the report for everyone.
What did you see?
How did investors react?
Yes, I mean, I think, as you pointed out, I think there was a little bit of something.
For everyone in their headline number was pretty strong, you know, we continue to see that being driven by healthcare, which is not necessarily the most economically sensitive sectors.
We did see some weakness in information technology or in like in, in, uh, information services, financial services, right?
Those tend to be your higher paying jobs, right?
So that's a little bit of, uh, you know, kind of a little bit of a negative mix, right?
And then, you know, kind of as you pointed out, right, we saw a little bit of a pullback in wages, but the average hourly work week kind of did move higher, right, so.
Generally speaking, like, you know, we've seen pretty volatile numbers over the last couple of months.
The fact that we're seeing over 100,000 jobs kind of added, right, that's positive, right, especially as people have suggested that the kind of break-even rate for unemployment is kind of closer to 25,000 per month, right?
So that's pretty positive, but the Federal Reserve at this point is very much secondary.
Overarching scheme of things, right, so you know they're going to be on hold for the foreseeable future.
I'm almost out of time.
What do we make of the ceasefire?
Not a ceasefire.
Don't say it's not a ceasefire, but a few strikes kind of going back and forth, mixed messaging, but still investors for the most part pretty positive.
We've heard some senior officials call those love taps, so they're not, we're not actually exchanging fire.
Look, I mean, markets clearly.
Still hoping for this diplomatic kind of resolution and no escalation from a kinetic perspective perspective in the current conflict, and you know we're kind of continuing to move higher on the back of that.
Yes, we definitely are.
Michael Ryan King, senior market strategist here at the New York Stock Exchange, have yourself a terrific weekend, my man.
It's nice to see you to kick off the broadcast.
