A Good Trading Day: Wall Street Closes Firmer Amid Thin Trading

All 11 S&P 500 sector indexes surged on Thursday, with communication service and technology as the biggest winner with gains of nearly 3%.

Wall Street’s main indexes closed higher on Thursday, led by growth stocks amid thin trading conditions, as US jobs data signaled the Fed’s interest rate hikes started to depress the labour market’s strength during the ongoing fight to get inflation under control.

Selling pressure has been recently devastating the market and eventually traders have come to feel that they could enjoy a brief break. That allowed stocks to move higher, and with lower volume that can materialize into a good trading day.

Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc, whose shares have been battered in the past few sessions, each gained more than 2.5%.

The Fed’s aggressive interest rate hikes hammered US stocks all the year long, with the benchmark S&P 500 shedding 19.3% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbling nearly 33%.

The technology, consumer discretionary and communication services sectors – which house several rate-sensitive high growth shares – are down between 29% and 40% this year, making them the worst performers among S&P 500 sector indexes. Energy shares have bucked the trend with stellar annual gains of 57%.