Market Week Recap: This is a short general summary of key events during the previous week. It recaps major economic data and highlights key dates to watch in the upcoming week. Market Week Recap also includes up-to-date data on the Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Russell 2000, Global Dow, Federal funds target interest rate, and the 10-year Treasury yield.
The Markets (as of market close December 23, 2016)
The ‘Trump Rally’ continues. The Dow reached its seventh consecutive week of gains as it nears 20000. As it stood at the close of last week, the Dow was about 66 points away from that milestone. During a slow week of trading leading up to the holidays, each of the indexes listed here closed on the positive side except for the Global Dow, which lost about 6 points (0.23%). For the first time in several weeks, the yield on 10-year Treasuries narrowed as bond prices kicked up a bit.
The price of crude oil (WTI) increased last week, closing at $53.10 per barrel, up from the prior week’s closing price of $52.03 per barrel. Gold (COMEX) remained volatile as its price fell again last week, closing at $1,133.30 by late Friday afternoon, down from the prior week’s price of $1,136.80. The national average retail regular gasoline price increased to $2.264 per gallon on December 19, 2016, $0.028 more than last week’s price and $0.238 higher than a year ago.