NEW YORK, Dec 31 — US stocks were mixed at the start of 2019’s final trading day, with Wall Street still poised to clinch its best annual performance in six years.
The split start came despite a pre-opening tweet from President Donald Trump, announcing that a new partial US-China trade would be signed in Washington in mid-January.
A brisk rally in the recent weeks has lifted stocks to a string of all-time highs, boosted by hopes for sustained economic growth and a cooling of the US-China trade conflict.
“The ceremony will take place at the White House. High level representatives of China will be present,” Trump tweeted.
He said he would then travel to Beijing to continue negotiations “at a later date.”
Fifteen minutes into the day’s trading session, the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average was down less than a tenth of a per cent at 28,452.24.
Meanwhile, the broader S&P 500 was essentially flat at 3,221.56 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was up 0.1 per cent at 8,951.99.
“From a broad standpoint, everything went up this year,” analyst Patrick O’Hare wrote at Briefing.com
“Large-cap stocks, small-cap stocks, mid-cap stocks — they all went up. Cyclical sectors, countercyclical sectors — they all went up.”
Economic data from China showed that country’s manufacturing sector expanded, but only just barely, in December.
Later today, the Conference Board was due to publish December consumer-confidence data for December. Economists expect it to show that a significant increase occurred during the holiday shopping period. — AFP
