The final full trading week in May was another interesting one for market participants as a slew of news came out. Although there wasn’t a lot of scheduled news on the calendar, the passage of the Trump administration’s spending bill in the House was a dominant story that influenced equity markets. The Senate has already promised that there will be changes to the House version, so it’s unlikely that anything will pass for a few more days.
On Thursday, the first bit of scheduled news came out when the unemployment claims data for the past week was released. For the last seven days, there were 227,000 requests for benefits compared to an expected 230,000 requests.
The Flash Manufacturing PMI came in at 52.3 compared to an expected 49.9. This indicates that manufacturing has picked up in the United States. The Services PMI also came in above 50 with a reading of 52.3 for the month of April. This was also above expectations as analysts had predicted a reading of 51 for April.
On Friday, new home sales data was released, and during the previous month, there were 743,000 new homes sold. This was above the projected 694,000 and also more than the 670,000 such properties sold in March.
The S&P 500 lost 85 points this week, which was a loss of 1.44 percent. The market made a high of 5,964 on Monday afternoon before losing ground for most of the rest of the week. On Friday morning, it made a low of 5,771 before reversing and paring some of its losses.
Like the S&P 500, the Dow also closed lower this week losing 735 points to finish at 41,603 at the close of business Friday. This represented a loss of 1.73 percent for an index that has gained just over 8 percent for the month. The market made its weekly high of 42,810 on Monday afternoon before reversing and losing ground the reset of the week. It made a low of 41,404 on Friday morning.
Finally, the Nasdaq would also give up ground this week, closing 172 points lower on Friday compared to Monday’s open. The result was a .91 percent loss for the past five trading days. The market closed the week at 18,737 after ranging between a weekly high of 19,228 set on Wednesday and a weekly low of 18,606 set on Friday.
In international news, Canada announced on Friday that retail sales were up .8 percent on a monthly basis. Earlier in the week, Great Britain announced that inflation had accelerated to 3.5 percent on an annualized basis.
The upcoming week should be another consequential one. On Friday, the Core PCE index will be released, and it’s expected to show that inflation rose by .1 percent in April. FOMC meeting minutes as well as durable goods orders will be released as well.