What happened last week…
The stock market rebounded with weekly gains for all three major indices: DJIA (1.96%), S&P 500 (1.68%), NASDAQ (1.73%). Each index is positive for November with a final, shortened week remaining. Year-to-date performances are as follows: DJIA (17.53%), S&P 500 (25.15%), NASDAQ (26.60%).
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has recommended to a judge that Alphabet (GOOG) divest from its Chrome internet browser. According to the filing, the initial proposed final judgment “requires Google to divest Chrome, which will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.” The DOJ also seeks to prevent Alphabet from entering into exclusionary agreements with third parties. Earlier this year, Alphabet was found to have violated antitrust law with unlawful monopolies in search services and advertising.
Amazon (AMZN) will invest an additional $4 billion into artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, thus doubling its prior funding and bring its total investment to $8 billion. Amazon will remain a minority investor. It was previously announced that Anthropic would use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and it will now also use AWS as its primary training partner and “will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models.”
Existing home sales for October beat expectations (3.93 million) as it increased to 3.96 million from the downwardly revised 3.83 million (from 3.84 million), which had been the lowest reading in 14 years. The current reading is tied for the highest figure over the past five months.
Happening this week…
On Tuesday, new home sales for October are expected to decrease to 730,000 from 738,000, which was the highest level since May 2023.
On Wednesday, the GDP growth rate (second estimate) for Q3 2024 is expected to be 2.8%, which would match the first estimate but would be a decline from the Q2 2024 rate of 3.0%. The Q1 2024 rate of 1.6% was the lowest growth since the Covid pandemic.
On Thursday, the stock market will be closed in observance of Thanksgiving. On Friday, the stock market will close early at 1:00 PM EST.
Thanks for reading!
- The Rockline Team
Rockline Wealth Management (RWM) is a registered investment adviser located in Plainview, NY. RWM is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any specific level of skill or training and does not constitute an endorsement of the firm by the Commission.
The information presented above is for informational purposes only and believed to be factual and up-to-date, but we do not guarantee its accuracy and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subjects discussed.