Wall St. reports weekly gain ahead of Fed policy meet

• Financial

On Friday, all three key indices of Wall St. edged higher after what could be contemplated as an utterly choppy week which was marred with a mirage of mixed signals, as market participants appeared to be betting on a less-hawkish Fed on its January 31-February 1 policy meet.

In the matter of the fact, in the day’s gains in the Wall Street was almost entirely galvanized by optimism that the US Federal Reserve might just pause its aggressive rate-hike cycle following a series of mixed data including a melt-down in consumers’ demand.

On top of that, US Commerce Department had underscored later last week that the US economy has been facing off an “underlying weakness” despite logging a quarterly GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth of 2.9 per cent, spurring up hopes of a less-hawkish policy stance from the US Fed while heightening up the bets of growth stocks.

If truth is to be spoken, growth stocks are conventionally more vulnerable to a hawkish policy stance from the US Federal Reserve. Aside from that, Chevron pummels after missing profit estimate, adding a holocaust on energy stocks while scalping a substantial scale of gains from the trade-sensitive Dow.

Wall St. ends higher, posts weekly percentage gain

Citing statistics, on Friday’s Wall St. wind-down, trade-sensitive Dow closed 0.08 per cent higher to 33,978.08 and Wall Street bellwether S&P 500 gained 0.25 per cent to 4,070.56, while Nasdaq jumped 0.95 per cent.

So far over the early weeks this year, Nasdaq gained 11 per cent and S&P 500 added 6 per cent, while Dow rose by 2.5 per cent. Meanwhile, addressing to a severing in consumers’ demand which in effect had torrented investors’ optimism that the US Fed might just pause its hawkish monetary policy, “(The PCE report) is another building block to the inflation data we’ve been seeing recently……opening the door for the Fed to end its aggressive rate hiking cycle”.