After a blistering Thursday that saw the S&P 500 close with its best session in nearly two years — up 2.3% — Wall Street’s price action turned sluggish on a Friday lacking market-moving economic events.

By midday in New York, major indices were slightly positive or hovering around the flat line, signaling a slowdown in the bullish sentiment compared to the previous session.

Since the beginning of the week, the S&P 500 is down 0.5%, with a few hours of trading left to determine whether the U.S. stock market can avoid closing in the red for the fourth consecutive week.

Meanwhile, there's a renewed demand for long-dated U.S. Treasury bonds, with yields declining by about 6 basis points on both the 10-year and 30-year notes. As a result, the popular iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF TLT rallied 1%, snapping a three-session losing streak.

The dollar slightly weakened, slipping 0.5% against the Japanese yen after three consecutive days of gains.

Traders now see nearly equal odds of a 50-basis-point or a 25-basis-point rate cut by the Federal Reserve in September, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool.

In commodities, oil is up 0.7%, with West Texas Intermediate (WTI) light crude poised for its third consecutive session of gains.

Bitcoin BTC/USD plunged 2% after rallying nearly 12%, marking its best-performing day since February 2022.

Friday’s Performance In Major US Indices, ETFs

Major Indices	Price	1-day %chg
S&P 500	5,329.24	0.2%
Nasdaq 100	18,426.22	0.1 %
Dow Jones	39,435.12	0.0%
Russell 2000	2,075.91	-0.5%

According to Benzinga Pro data:

• The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY rose 0.2% to $531.66.
• The SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average DIA was flat at $394.74.
• The tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust Series QQQ inched 0.2% higher to $448.94.
• The iShares Russell 2000 ETF IWM fell 0.5% to $205.88.
• The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund XLV outperformed, up by 0.4%. The Industrial Select Sector SPDR Fund XLI lagged, down by 0.2%.

Friday’s Stock Movers

• Palantir Technologies Inc. PLTR climbed 1.5%, building on the previous day’s 11% surge following the announcement of a partnership with Microsoft Corp. MSFT to deliver advanced cloud, artificial intelligence, and analytics capabilities to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Shares of Palantir are on track to close at the highest level since February 2021.
• Eli Lilly & Co. LLY surged over 6% after several investment banks raised their price targets, following a strong earnings report last quarter.
• Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO declined over 1% after revealing plans for thousands of job cuts, marking its second round of layoffs this year, as the company redirects its focus toward fast-growing sectors such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, Reuters reported.

Stocks reacting to company earnings are:

• Akamai Technologies, Inc. AKAM up 10%,
• CarGurus, Inc. CARG up 18%,
• Dropbox, Inc. DBX up 2.3%,
• elf Beauty, Inc. ELF down 15%,
• Evergy Inc. EVRG down 0.7%,
• Expedia Group, Inc. EXPE up 9%,
• Five9, Inc. FIVN down 26%,
• Gilead Sciences, Inc. GILD down 3%,
• Insulet Corporation PODD down over 7%,
• New Fortress Energy Inc. NFE down 26%,
• Paramount Global PARA up 0.5%,
• Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. TTWO up 2.5%,
• Trade Desk, Inc. TTD up 9.7%,
• Unity Software Inc. U up 11%,
• Yelp Inc. YELP up 2.6%.

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