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US stocks (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) capped off a historic May trading month with serious gains, the Nasdaq Composite ending the month over 9.5% higher and the S&P 500 seeing its best May since 1990.
Yahoo Finance markets and data editor Jared Blikre comes on Asking for a Trend to outline the month's biggest market themes, including what to expect in June and bitcoin's (BTC-USD) price moves.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
Well, the S&P 500 marking its best May in 30 years with the Nasdaq surging nearly 10% this month. Yahoo Finance Jared Blickry joining us now with the trading day takeaways, Jared.
Yeah, we got to start with this historic May because this was totally unexpected, especially in the depths of despair in April. And by the way, this was not only the best May since 1990, but the second best since 1948 and the fifth best since 1928, and that includes a bunch of crazy years in the 1930s. Everybody remembers those, right? All right. So here's a sector action over these 21 days. XLK, that is tech that grabs the front. That is up 10%. Then industrials, that is up 8.8%. Then you got consumer discretionary communication services. Here's the S&P 500 itself up 6.2%. So all of these are outperforming. That's our definition greater than the benchmark. And guess what? If you look at the Nasdaq, you can really see some of these high flyers here in the mag 7, these big market cap. Nvidia up over 20%. So is Broadcom. So is Tesla. That's three out of the top eight. Apple is kind of a black eye there, but whatever. And then if you look at the Dow, very similar story. Healthcare was the worst performing sector. If you remember the only one in the red there. And so we've got United Health down 12, 26% and Mark down about 10%, Josh.
All right. So may solid. What's coming next?
Yes. So I ran some stats on June and I'm going to be doing a deep dive on or yeah, Monday morning. And here's what I found so far. This is just looking at June, but I'm going to look ahead until the end of the year and also until next May. So a full year out. And what I did was I got this idea from Ryan Dietrich. He was looking at all the S&P 500 years where May was up more than a certain percentage. I think he was using 4%. I decided to use 3% because it gives a few more data points and 18 in total going all the way back to 1928. I sloughed off a few because I started at 1950, but the net result is June is one of the worst months, but still up 6 tenths of a percent. So about half of 1%, and it's positive 61% of the time. Nothing to write home about admittedly, but here's where the things get interesting here. S&P 500 since 1928 is less than that. It's about half of the returns and up a slightly less percent positive the time. That's up 58% of the time. And then if we go since 1990, June is actually one of the two worst months. I think I think September is actually the worst, and that's only up about 6 tenths of a percent. So the bottom line is June is not a great month, but given the strong May performance, it should be a little bit better. That gives it just a little bit better tilt. And if you recall, we had a really we were expecting a bullish April, that did not materialize. So I want to add a grain of salt here. Anything with the tariffs can kind of derail what we're talking about here in terms of seasonality.
Final question, what would be on your your wall of worry? What are the risks, the concerns we need to think about?
Exactly. I'm looking at Bitcoin, um, a Bitcoin rut pull because I have been looking at the price action. One of the things that Bitcoin has done historically, and let's get off this screen and get to Bitcoin, and let's actually show the trailing month here in crypto. So Bitcoin is up 11.2%, Ethereum's up 44%. These are nice numbers, but the chart was a little concerning because one of the things that Bitcoin is famous for is breaking to new highs and these are new highs right here, and then just descending and kind of reversing the trend. So if you see this trend line that I'm drawing in right here, it has broken the trend line. 105,000 is a make or break. You can see it's right below it right now. Uh, so I want to see it kind of climb above that, and then it'd be nice to get to new highs early next week. And then in terms of the general market, I have noticed that Bitcoin has been leading. So if Bitcoin falters here, maybe we do get that June surprise to the downside. So Bitcoin is going to be one of the things I'm watching over this weekend.
I was going to ask you this weekend. Is it Bitcoin? Is it the greenback?
If I have if I have to watch something, it might as well be Bitcoin, Josh. Thank you. Appreciate your perfect.
Thank you.
