Beat the street: Airlines and retail in focus as Thanksgiving gets under way

(Partial Video Transcript)

Dow looking down as volumes dip

Welcome to beat the street on Thursday 23 November. It's Thanksgiving Day, a little bit of a different feel to the show today, I just wanted to remind you quickly that we do have 24-hour trade on the US markets on the IG platform, despite the fact there's no cash session today.

And I wanted to show you this purely because, just in case something happens throughout the day, it is possible to go back to your IG terminal and trade this.

We are up at the moment on the Dow by a margin of almost one-tenth of one percent, but you can see here on the far right hand bottom part of the chart here, very low volumes at the moment. This is the Dow Industrials.

Basically, what's happening is that people are in a knee-jerk reaction, just continuing the trade that we've seen on the upside. That's the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

If you go to the S&P 500, you can see again, another little bit of a green candle there. Again, really low volumes. When you look back at the low volume days, all are either days of days off, such as Columbus Day or Veterans Day. You've got 4 July, these tiny volume days. This is going to be another day here.

IG platform offers 24-hour trading

But it's just in case that there's an opportunity to trade this market if something does happen, which brings people back to the markets. There are 24-hour trades on the IG platform. What is a wrap up as well with a look at what's happening on the US Tech 100, the NASDAQ on the IG platform.

Now, we've seen it break above this line of prior resistance of 15,930 in the last few days. It seems to be quite happy trading at that level now. These are now parts of the market we've not seen traded since 5 January 2022.

Tech stocks draw investors hopeful of rates cuts

These are something like around about 22-, 23-month highs for the NASDAQ. This means that people are going into these growth stocks, tech stocks, on hopes that the Federal Reserve (Fed), one, is done on interest rates.

The second possible is, and people are leaning into this idea that the professionals in the market are suggesting hasn't actually been confirmed, that the Fed is ready to cut interest rates come next May.

We are a little bit away from that. There's a lot of water to pass under the bridge before then. But at the moment, at least, despite the fact we got thin volumes, we are seeing the gains held on to, broadly speaking, on these markets on this Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Now, the Black Friday countdown has started. This is the day after Thanksgiving when retailers traditionally would be in the black for the year. So which retail stocks are likely to do well? Forecasts already pointing to the slowest holiday sales growth in five years, said numbers from the National Retail Federation.

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