John Hancock: Weekly Market Recap Week Ended January 10th
Dividend haul
Dividend payments in 2019 rose to a record high for the eighth year in a row. Payments by companies in the S&P 500 increased 6% from a year earlier to nearly $486 billion, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, which is forecasting 2020’s dividend total will exceed $500 billion.
Fast start
On the heels of the U.S. stock market’s best year since 2013, the first full week of 2020 was a strong one, with the S&P 500 and the Dow rising nearly 1% and the NASDAQ adding almost 2%. For the S&P 500, it was the sixth positive week out of the past seven.
Tech leadership
Information technology stocks continued to lift the market after a year in which the sector posted a total return of more than 50%. A handful of the biggest tech stocks gained more than 1% to lift the broader market on Wednesday—a key factor in the weekly outperformance by the tech-oriented NASDAQ relative to other broad indexes.
Dow 29K?
For the first time, the Dow briefly eclipsed 29,000 points—a threshold that it reached briefly on Friday morning before slipping later in the day and closing at nearly 28,824. It took just 37 trading sessions for the index to rise to 29,000 after breaching 28,000 in mid-November.
Source: https://wmr.jhinvestments.com/