The recent theme of the S&P 500 index futures selling off only to be bought back up continued for Tuesday’s session.
This time, the selloff started early on during premarket hours. Buy-the-dippers also showed up early, helping to hold the index futures above Monday’s low. By the open of the regular session, the index futures were trading just above mid-range on the day. April’s job openings data came in at 10:00am EDT, 3.6% below expectations (8.1 million vs. 8.4 million exp.). Algos quickly had the index back up to unchanged on the day, only to get sold off shortly after.
Following the morning’s news, the index futures continued to chop around the middle of the day’s range with sellers ultimately gaining the upper hand. However, the story wasn’t over for the buy-the-dip crowd as they defended the 5270 area during the lunch hour. Though the chop continued, the bulls started to gain the upper hand, pushing the index back into the green and even above the premarket highs.
Once the bulls were testing resistance around Monday’s high, a late-day comment came in from the US Treasury’s Yellen indicating the US “Will not tolerate” China’s rising exports to Russia of dual-use goods that can be used to aid their military. The index futures soon sold off from fresh intraday highs and dropped back below Monday’s closing mark. The good news is that buyers were ready to step in once again, and pushed the index back into the green during the final hour.
Despite the late-day selloff, the index futures still tacked on a gain of 6.75 handles to close at 5304, establishing a three-day win streak.
Among the top components of the index, NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) emerged as the biggest gainer for the second day in a row, ahead of its stock split scheduled for June 7. The chip designer was able to advance by $14.37 or 1.25% to close at $1164.37 for the day, marking new all-time and all-time closing highs for the issue.
That performance was over 11 times better than the cash index’s advance of 0.11%.
The biggest loser ended up being JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM). For the day, the banking behemoth declined by $2.66 or 1.32% to close at $199.16.
