Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Wall Street Takes a Nap

We may have just gotten done with a long holiday weekend, but it was last week when Wall Street took a vacation. A week ago Monday, the S&P 500 index ticked up 0.3 percent - and that turned out to be the biggest move of the week. There were three days when it moved less than 0.1 percent.

One factor was the very low volume, which suggests that brokers had already begun their summer vacations. On an average day, about 6.3 billion shares are traded, but the trend was lower than that all week, dropping to 4.9 billion shares by Friday.

The sleepiness of this stock market is a fairly recent trend; prior to last week, the S&P had actually been pretty volatile. There have already been 15 days when the S&P has moved by more than 1 percent this year, compared with 19 for all of last year.

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