Stocks rise on the quarter's final trading day as the G20 summit kicks off
- Stocks rose in the US on Friday as investors looked toward the G20 summit in Japan, where President Donald Trump and the Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to convene.
- After a brutal May for equity markets, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is on track for its best month since 2015, and the S&P 500 is on pace for its best month since January.
- Apple was among the market's notable movers. Shares traded slightly lower after the company announced the day prior that its veteran design chief, Jony Ive, was leaving.
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US stocks rose on Friday as investors looked toward the G20 summit in Japan, where President Donald Trump and the Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to discuss their trade war that's dragged on for more than a year.
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average are set to close out the month with respective gains of 6.2% and 6.9%. Those moves place the US indices on pace for their best months since 2015, and January, respectively. The US dollar index, which measures the greenback's strength against a basket of rival currencies, traded lower.
Here's where the major US indices stood Friday morning:
With the S&P 500 up 17% this year, 2019 is now setting up to be one of the strongest in a decade, Tom Lee, the co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, noted in a Friday report to clients.
"But the path to these gains seems to be operating in two abrupt modes this year: up and down (risk-on and risk-off)," Lee said. "Recent incoming data is softening and as we noted last week, we expect US PMIs to eventually dip below 50 by 3Q19 before rebounding throughout 2020, a movement predicted by the US 30Y-10Y yield curve 16 months ago."
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Within the S&P 500, the biggest gainers included the Corona parent Constellation Brands, which surged 8% after the company reported quarterly revenue that topped analysts' expectations.
Shares of the largest US banks, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo, were also counted among the largest gainers after they all passed the Federal Reserve's annual stress tests.
Meanwhile the index's biggest loser was the biotechnology company Biogen, which fell 1.5% after an analyst at the firm Piper Jaffray downgraded Biogen's rating to "neutral" from "overweight."
Apple was another one of the S&P 500's notable losers, which slipped less than 1% after the company announced the day prior that its veteran design chief, Jony Ive, was leaving to start his own firm.
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