What powered the S&P 500 to new record highs

The 8:30 Hosts Julie Hyman, Pras Subramanian, and Jake Conley discuss what's powering new record highs from the S&P 500 (^GSPC) and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC).

We are coming in at record highs, with futures are indicating a lower open.

It's a little bit of a little bit of a pullback.

Yeah, a little bit of a pullback. But, you know, we did have and have had the run-up that has been going on in stocks that took the S&P 500 to another record close yesterday, the Nasdaq as well, even though we've got a little bit of pullback this morning. And, you know, it depends on your perspective, either it was a very narrow rally to the top, or it was a slightly broadening rally.

In other words, if you look at the advanced decline or how many stocks are trading above their 200 day moving averages or shorter whatever moving average you want to pick. It's worse, the breath looks worse than it did six months ago,

but it looks better than it did a week ago. And not um, 10 of the 11 groups in the S&P 500 were higher yesterday.

So, um and utilities did the best. We talked about Constellation energy and it's um new deal with Alphabet yesterday. That helped power it higher, it helped other utility stocks higher. So all of that bullishness that's out there, um, it's not gone this morning.

But it is perhaps diminished uh this morning. Um I was listening to the compound uh podcast recently and Michael Batnick had a good description of the market right now.

He said there's not fear in the market necessarily, if you look at things like the Vix, but there is doubt in the market. And I thought that was a good way to describe the way things feel right now.

Yeah, we're not seeing the uh the exuberance that some of the returns in tech might suggest.

Just because to your point of the breadth, yes, it's gotten better over the last week, but if you take a longer timeline, it does look a little weaker. I want to put a finer point on that with some data um that we got this morning. So, since the prior S&P record, which was last set on August 13th, seven of the 10 largest constituents in the index rose. That's your meta, your Micron, your Tesla, nine of the 10 smallest fell. Norwegian Cruise,

MGM, Win, Pentair, all falling more than 20%. So there's a there's a a really strong concentration of performance and we've been saying this over and over again in tech, in the sector that's been powering all of this.

Our old friend Josh Shafer over at Barrons, who looked at the equal weight S&P 500 relative to the market cap weighted S&P 500. As we know, there's a lot of different ways to slice breath of the market, equal weight, equal weights everything. So it's a good way to look at it. He says, so if you look at them relative to each other, the S&P equal weight is making its lowest close relative to the S&P 500 since 2003 on the same day that the S&P 500 is set to make a record.

Again, another way of saying the breath is not great here. There's just not that many stocks participating and it's tech that has been pulling everything higher.