People visit the ice ring at the Rockefeller Center Black during Black Friday in New York City.
U.S. stock futures were little changed on Sunday, as investors look to end the year on a positive note after a volatile November.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM00) was down 18 points, or 0.1%, while S&P 500 futures (ES00) were about flat and Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ00) ticked up slightly.
Crude oil prices (CL.1) rallied 1.7% after OPEC+ on Sunday reaffirmed its previously announced plan to pause output hikes through the first quarter of 2026, amid growing concerns of a coming surplus in the global oil supply. The price of West Texas intermediate crude has fallen more than 18% year to date after a series of production boosts by the OPEC+ nations this year.
Bitcoin (BTCUSD) continued its recovery Sunday, recently trading above the $91,000 level. The cryptocurrency has gained about 2.5% over the past five days, though it still down more than 14% over the past month.
Preliminary data showed shoppers were out in force for Black Friday sales, with a record $11.8 billion spent online Friday, according to Adobe Analytics, up 9% from last year. But while that data may appear encouraging for retail stocks, MarketWatch columnist Mark Hulbert noted that, historically speaking, the S&P Retail Select Industry Index’s two-trading-day performance from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is inversely correlated with how it subsequently performs through the end of December. That’s largely because Wall Street tends to overreact to those early numbers, Hulbert wrote.
See: Why investors should hope this Cyber Monday is a down day for retail stocks
In an abbreviated trading session Friday, stocks rallied to end the month with a five-session winning streak – their best Thanksgiving-week performance since 2008. The S&P 500 SPX gained 3.7% last week and the Dow DJIA rose 3.2%. That may be good news for December; according to Dow Jones Market Data, when the S&P 500 has gained more than 2% during Thanksgiving week, the index has posted December gains 80% of the time, going back to 1950.
Read more: Stocks stage big comeback in best Thanksgiving week since 2008. What comes next?
The Dow and S&P 500 gained for the seventh straight month, while the Nasdaq COMP fell 1.5% in November, snapping a seven-month winning streak, as AI stocks sold off amid fears of a bubble.
Investors will be focused on the upcoming Fed meeting Dec. 9-10, widely expecting another interest-rate cut. As of Sunday, CMS’s FedWatch tool gave an 87% chance of a cut at that meeting.
In November, “markets collectively shrugged off AI valuation alarms, government shutdown anxiety, and mid-month growth scares and instead rediscovered the comfort blanket” of likely Fed easing, Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, wrote in a weekend note.
“There’s still a caveat hanging over the door,” he added. “Fed cutting cycles aren’t always bullish. If labor softening morphs into real deterioration, the policy mix shifts from normalization to triage, and equities historically don’t enjoy the view from that room. But we’re not there yet.”
-Mike Murphy
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