Dow, S&P 500 Rise As Yields Slip Ahead Of Fed Decision

(CTN News) – Despite concerns over interest rates staying higher for longer, the S&P 500 and Dow gained on Wednesday as Treasury yields pulled back ahead of a likely pause in the Federal Reserve’s policy tightening campaign, although concerns over rates staying higher for longer held investor sentiment in check.

It is widely S&P 500 expected that the Federal Reserve will maintain its key policy rate in the range of 5.25%-5.50% when it concludes its meeting at 2 p.m. EST, with investors focused on Fed economic projections and Chairman Jerome Powell’s comments in order to gather clues as to the outlook for rates and inflation.

Despite this, megacap growth stocks, such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple, declined between 0.7% and 1.6%, weighing on the communication services and information technology sectors, among others.

Also, the S&P 500 Nasdaq, which has a lot of tech stocks, gave up some of its early gains.

As another sign of new market entrants failing to hold on to their gains on debut, Instacart lost 5.5% on its debut, while Arm Holdings lost 4.4% on its debut.

Following the company’s initial public offering, in which the shares were priced above their indicated range, the S&P 500 Boston-based company secured a valuation of $9.2 billion.

In the morning session at 11:47 a.m. Eastern Time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 190.38 points, or 0.55%, at 34,708.11, the S&P 500 was up 7.87 points, or 0.18%, at 4,451.82, and the Nasdaq Composite was down 24.00 points, or 0.18%, at 13,654.18.

On Tuesday, Pinterest’s share price rose 4.3% following Citigroup’s upgrade of the image-sharing platform to “buy” from “neutral” and the company’s announcement of a $1 billion share buyback program.

After CoverGirl parent company Coty raised its like-for-like sales forecast for the entire year, the company added 5.1% to its share price.

On the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, it can be observed that advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a ratio of 3.58-to-1 and 1.59-to-1, respectively, on the NYSE and Nasdaq.

There were 10 new 52-week highs and four new lows recorded by the S&P 500 index, while 33 new highs and 140 new lows were recorded by the Nasdaq.

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