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Relief came to the stock market today after a big sell-off which began yesterday afternoon and closed at session lows. Today we closed at session highs. I guess you could call that a “bounce-back.” We didn’t gain all the losses from a day ago, and are still off all-time highs, so a positive read would say that we may have some room to run from here. The Dow gained +322 points, +0.87%, the S&P 500 was +48 points, +1.03%, and the Nasdaq gained +185 points,  +1.26%. The small-cap Russell 2000 won the day, however, +1.54%.

Healthy Weekly Jobless Claims this morning helped support the bullish narrative, and neither a more-realistic downward Q3 GDP revision nor another weak Philly Fed number were enough to quash it. But a bigger takeaway today is there wasn’t a slide continuing a second day on the markets; at this point, we can see yesterday as pocketing some profits gained from late-October lows.

NIKE (NKE) posted fiscal Q2 results after today’s closing bell, with better-than-expected earnings on in-line revenues. Earnings of $1.03 per share easily surpassed the 84 cents in the Zacks consensus (and swung to a positive year over year from 85 cents per share posted a year ago), while revenues of $13.4 billion were exactly as analysts were anticipating. But shares are selling off nearly -5% on the news, as the company stated it expects softer revenues in the second half of next fiscal year. This may be a forecast for cooler markets in China next year; details will no doubt be available on the conference call.

Tomorrow morning, we get the Fed’s preferred inflation metric: Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for November. One reason for this is that PCE combines data from across other economic reports, and hence has a fewer amount of revisions month over month. Expectations are for core (subtracting volatile food and energy prices) PCE month over month to come down to +0.1% from +0.2% the previous month, +3.3% on core year over year, down from the +3.5% in October.

These would all be consistent with what the Fed sees as cooling inflation overall. Supply-chain disruptions have not only been ironed out over time, but higher interest rates — 5.25-5.50% since late July — have curbed runaway pricing for goods and services. As of now, skirmishes in the Red Sea are not much of a factor in freezing up supply chains going forward, and in any case, we wouldn’t see them in November numbers.

All in all, it’s been a lovely couple of months on the stock market; you can say Christmas came early this year. Whether this continues into a legit “Santa Claus Rally” — considered the time period between tomorrow and the end of the year — remains to be seen. We do know that markets tend to tick up to end a year. But even if they don’t, we’ve had a strong bounce-back day, quarter, and full-year 2023. Ho ho ho!

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