Image Source: Pixabay

Markets rallied for a second straight day, bringing weekly totals up anywhere from +3.2% on the blue-chip Dow to +4.7% on the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Just as it looked like the final trading months of 2023 were going to be more of the same tepid activity, we blast off +564 points on the Dow. It finished +1.7% on the session. The Nasdaq was up +232 points or +1.78%, while the S&P 500 gained +1.89%. The small-cap Russell 2000, still playing catch-up with its major index peers, jumped an excellent +2.69% today.

Leading up to a Fed meeting where interest rates were thought to not be increased, and then they weren’t, gave something of a relief rally to the proceedings. Worsening weekly and continuing jobless claims this morning actually helped justify the Fed’s decision to not raise rates, and perhaps most importantly of all — bond yield rates came down notably from their multi-year highs, with the 2-year back below 5% and the 10-year down to 4.663%. This has triggered a seemingly automatic re-attraction to the equities market.

The biggest company reporting earnings today is the biggest company in the world: Apple (AAPL), which put out fiscal Q4 numbers after the closing bell today. Results were fine, but not the boffo figures we’d grown accustomed to over the years: earnings of $1.46 per share outpaced the Zacks consensus of $1.39, and grew +13% year over year. Revenues of $89.5 billion surpassed the $89.03 billion expected and swung to a profit year over year.

But for a company of Apple’s magnitude, with the new iPhone 15 having come out in the quarter, these numbers aren’t exactly hot (not nearly as hot as some of the phones were getting) — especially for a company trading at 26x forward earnings. Growth in the U.S. was OK, but not much in China. The company did set an all-time record for Services revenue and issued a 24-cent per share cash dividend, but shares have dropped about -1% in late trading.

Booking Holdings (BKNG), on the other hand, posted +36% earnings growth in its Q3 earnings this afternoon to $72.32 per share, on $7.3 billion in sales that outshone the Zacks consensus $7.23 billion and grew +21% year over year. The company saw “resilience in leisure/travel demand” in the quarter. However, the statement provided no guidance, and perhaps the reason we’re seeing a -6.6% drop in shares in the after-market is because we’re selling the news. Some investors were also looking for a stock split, and once again they did not get one.

Booking rival Expedia (EXPE) reported record adjusted EBITDA up +13% to $1.2 billion in its Q3 report out after the bell, with earnings of $5.41 per share easily taking out the $5.15 expected, on $3.93 billion in revenues for the quarter which topped the $3.87 billion analysts were looking for. Shares are up +9% in late trading, likely to do with adjusting for its recent downtrodden value levels. Its One Key loyalty program reportedly brought good early results.

Tomorrow morning brings us the big Employment Situation report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We’re expecting to see around 170K new jobs filled for October — about half what the BLS reported the previous month — on an expected +3.8% Unemployment Rate. These are both historically good numbers, even if they pale in comparison to the previous month. Other employment metrics have depicted dwindling job adds across all sectors; we shall see if this is where we find ourselves tomorrow.

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