It was a sleepy start for stocks following the Fourth of July holiday, with the major indexes bouncing between positive and negative territory throughout Wednesday's session.
The choppy price action came as market participants looked ahead to the mid-afternoon release of the minutes from the June Fed meeting (when it chose to pause hiking interest rates) and continued into the close.
The release of the Fed meeting minutes was the main event on today's relatively quiet economic calendar. The minutes showed that "some participants" favored another quarter-point rate hike at the June gathering, with those in support of this saying there were "few clear signs" that inflation was easing amid a still-strong labor market.
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However, "all participants continued to anticipate that … maintaining a restrictive stance for monetary policy would be appropriate" to reach the Fed's 2% inflation target, the minutes indicated.
Meta takes aim at Twitter
Meanwhile, there was plenty of single-stock action to keep investors on their toes. Meta Platforms (META), for one, jumped 2.9% after the Facebook parent said it will release this Thursday a microblogging app called Threads. The app is expected to compete with Elon Musk's Twitter. The latter social media app caused an uproar over the weekend when it said it would temporarily limit the number of posts unverified users can see in a day.
Elsewhere, United Parcel Services (UPS) shed 2.1% after the Teamsters Union said the logistics giant "walked away" from contract negotiations. UPS, for its part, accused the union of ending discussions. The contract between the two parties expires at the end of this month.
As for the major indexes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.4% to 34,288, the S&P 500 shed 0.2% to 4,446, and the Nasdaq Composite gave back 0.2% to 13,791.
ETF popularity gained ground Q2
Interest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) rose in the second quarter amid "a strong performance in the U.S. equity market and a risk-on investor mentality," says Aniket Ullal, head of ETF Data & Analytics at CFRA Research. Domestic equity ETFs, in particular, were popular over the three-month period, taking in $64 billion in net new inflows vs $2.5 billion in outflows in Q1.
"The reversal in domestic equity ETF flows was sparked by the sharp rebound in U.S. equity performance in the first half of this year," Ullal says, with the recovery led by tech ETFs and growth ETFs – two strategies that "significantly underperformed" in 2022.
Investors looking for the best ETFs to ride the risk-on rally have plenty of options at their disposal, including the best AI ETFs and the best Bitcoin ETFs. Cryptocurrencies were another area of the market that "received a significant boost this year after BlackRock filed for a spot bitcoin ETF," Ullal adds.
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