Stocks Gain As Wall Street Banks Hit Two-Year High: Markets Wrap

Wall Street kicked off the earnings season with stocks hitting all-time highs as big banks rallied after posting solid results.

The S&P 500 topped 5,800, notching its 45th record in 2024. Equity traders worried that the start of Federal Reserve rate cuts would sap bank profits saw things weren’t that bad, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. churning out a surprise increase in net interest income.

At Wells Fargo & Co., NII slumped — but the firm expects that drop to be less steep in the last quarter. Each stock rose at least 4.4%, pushing the KBW Bank Index to the highest since April 2022.

“We expect earnings season to be solid, including the big banks,” said Michael Landsberg, chief investment officer at Landsberg Bennett Private Wealth Management. “Credit card delinquencies are still very low and increased economic activity should drive bank revenues.”

The S&P 500 rose 0.6%, extending gains into a fifth straight week — its longest winning run since May. The Nasdaq 100 added 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1%. The Russell 2000 climbed 2.1%. Tesla Inc. dropped 8.8% after the unveiling of its Robotaxi was light on specifics. Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. jumped over 9.5%.

Treasuries saw small moves, with shorter maturities outperforming. A Bloomberg gauge of US bonds posted a fourth straight week of declines. The dollar barely budged, while capping a second consecutive week of gains in anticipation of a slower pace of rate cuts. West Texas Intermediate oil settled below $76 a barrel.

“Now that the Fed has started its rate-cutting cycle, the economy should get a further boost from lower interest rates on things like credit card debt and business loans,” said David Lefkowitz at UBS Global Wealth Management. “As a result, we expect third-quarter earnings results will be consistent with recent, healthy trends.”

In non-recessionary scenarios, the S&P 500 rises 17% on average in the 12 months after the Fed starts to cut rates, Lefkowitz noted. He reiterated his S&P 500 price targets of 5,900 and 6,200 for December 2024 and June 2025.

Apollo’s Torsten Slok noted that financials have been among top outperformers during the Fed’s rate cutting cycles that end with a “soft landing.”

Slok looked at total returns of each sector during the two rate cut cycles that didn’t overlap with a recession, from July 1995 to January 1996 and from September 1998 to November 1998.

In the run-up to the third-quarter earnings season, an unusually large dichotomy took shape, according to Gina Martin Adams, Michael Casper and Wendy Soong at Bloomberg Intelligence. 

Analysts kept lowering the bar for S&P 500 companies while management guidance implied a significantly stronger outlook — suggesting that companies should easily beat expectations, they noted.

S&P 500 net income growth is now forecast to rise a mere 4.2% in the third quarter, down from more than 7% growth expected in mid-July, thanks mostly to the energy sector. Analysts’ souring outlook is not exclusive to energy, however, as estimates for all sectors except for communication services fell, they said.

Currently, 37% of S&P 500 companies are expected to report lower earnings per share than the previous year this quarter, compared to 26.6% last quarter, BI concluded.