Top 10 things to watch Tuesday, Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve 1. Wall Street on Tuesday was looking to break a three-session losing streak. Ahead of the final trading day of 2024, the S & P 500 was down 2% for December but up 2.5% in the fourth quarter. Tuesday is a full trading day for equities. But the bond market will close at 2 p.m. ET. The markets are closed Wednesday for New Year’s Day. 2. The S & P 500 was up nearly 24% year to date, as of Monday’s close. The broad market index closed up more than 24% in 2023, marking the first back-to-back 20%-plus years since 1997 and 1998. In fact, back then, 1995 and 1996 were both up 20%-plus, too. 3. Treasury yields were down slightly on Tuesday, with the 10-year Treasury just above 4.5%. That’s the lowest yield for the 10-year since Dec. 20. The 2-year Treasury yield also traded down to 4.23%, its lowest since Dec. 18. Bond yields have been elevated despite the Federal Reserve’s three interest rate cuts this year. Lower yields tend to support stocks. 4. Natural gas dropped 4% on Tuesday, a day after settling up more than 16%. Monday’s surge was fueled by expectations of a colder January on the East Coast. Even with Tuesday’s pullback, nat gas was up strongly in December, the fourth quarter, and year to date. 5. Oil prices , on the other hand, were up modestly this month and for the fourth quarter. But they were about flat for the year. 6. Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives lists his Top 10 winners for the artificial intelligence revolution in 2025. The group includes Club names Alphabet , Apple , Microsoft , Nvidia , and Salesforce , as well as Palantir , Tesla , and Snowflake . We’ll continue to roll out our profiles of the Investing Club’s core holdings, which include Nvidia and Apple , our two “own them, don’t trade them” stocks. 7. Citi expects memory pricing to continue decoupling in 2025, with mobile and personal computer memory pricing falling and server and graphics DRAM increasing. 8. The Wall Street Journal highlights China’s push for homegrown semiconductor chips in its electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more mixed data out of China as stimulus continued to fail boost the world’s second-largest economy. 9. The U.S. Treasury said it was hacked by a Chinese threat actor. As cyber warfare continues to heat up, that’s why we’re invested in two cybersecurity stocks: Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike . 10. Bitcoin was relatively unchanged Tuesday, trading around 95,500 per coin. It caps off a historic year for the cryptocurrency. Year to date, bitcoin has more than doubled and earlier this month it traded well above $100,000 — a level breached for the first time ever on Dec. 4. Sign up for my Top 10 Morning Thoughts on the Market email newsletter for free (See here for a full list of the stocks at Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Top 10 things to watch Tuesday, Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve
1. Wall Street on Tuesday was looking to break a three-session losing streak. Ahead of the final trading day of 2024, the S&P 500 was down 2% for December but up 2.5% in the fourth quarter. Tuesday is a full trading day for equities. But the bond market will close at 2 p.m. ET. The markets are closed Wednesday for New Year’s Day.
2. The S&P 500 was up nearly 24% year to date, as of Monday’s close. The broad market index closed up more than 24% in 2023, marking the first back-to-back 20%-plus years since 1997 and 1998. In fact, back then, 1995 and 1996 were both up 20%-plus, too.
3. Treasury yields were down slightly on Tuesday, with the 10-year Treasury just above 4.5%. That’s the lowest yield for the 10-year since Dec. 20. The 2-year Treasury yield also traded down to 4.23%, its lowest since Dec. 18. Bond yields have been elevated despite the Federal Reserve’s three interest rate cuts this year. Lower yields tend to support stocks.
