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Market Recap: Monday, October 12

The markets closed in the green with the NASDAQ leading the way as investors look ahead to new earnings results, set to be stronger and improved from earlier in the year, as well as stalled stimulus package talks in Washington. The Final Round panel discusses the latest.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Taking a look at the sector action, though, investors seem to be shrugging that off, though, when you take a look at the outperformers today. And with no stimulus, it makes sense when you take a look at the leaderboard. Big tech is back in favor.

You're seeing Apple up just around 6%, Facebook up around 4%, as well as Amazon. Google up just around 3 and 1/2% and Microsoft also in the green, so technology names are really the outperformer in today's market. In addition to technology, we're also seeing solid gains for the communication services sectors, as well as consumer discretionary and consumer staples.

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On the flip side, though, energy getting a little bit of a boost, actually, in the final hour of trading, but continues to underperform some of the other sectors. Materials is the laggard in today's trading. Those two sectors were in favor last week, both were the outperformers.

Well, here with me for the next 60 minutes, we have Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer. We're also joined by Akiko Fujita, Rick Newman, and Jared Blikre joining us here to break down today's action. And Jared, let me just kick it over to you first. When you take a look at the gains today, we are seeing a bit of, I guess, shift, rotation back into those big tech names, back into the stocks that have been working at the start of the pandemic, fell out of favor with investors over the last couple of weeks. But what do you make of today's action?

JARED BLIKRE: Well, yeah, we're seeing the big caps lead again, and not a surprise given the events that are upcoming here. But as long as the other guys tag along and contribute on some of these other days, you get a rally underway. That's what a bull market looks like. You don't have the same leadership every day or even throughout the day. We saw some changes late in the day where energy and financials kind of came back.

And just looking at market breadth overall, we've really had a broad-based day. We had another record-setting day for internals in terms of the advance decline lines of the New York Stock Exchange and the S&P 500, means a lot of participation there. We have 189 new 52-week highs in the NYSE listed stocks. So put all that together-- and by the way, that's the biggest number since, I think, March. So you put it all together, it's very constructive.

And you just look at this heat map here, and it's almost jaw-dropping to see the big numbers out of these tech giants. You're talking about a market cap of, what, $5 or $6-- well, $4 or $5, $6 trillion for these guys, and they just increased it by, what, $10, $20 billion? I'm going to run and do that calculation right after this, but that's a lot of market cap gains right there.

And then you've got the S&P 500, we'll go back to that chart here. We'll do a little bit longer. This is a three-month time frame. And you can see, we're just knocking on the door here of these record highs that were just under 3,600 only about five weeks ago. So altogether, constructive action. We'll have to see what happens if and when we get to these peaks here.

SEANA SMITH: Certainly is constructive action. But Andy, it's interesting, because a lot of the gains, at least last week, was attributed to that we were getting some progress on the stimulus talks. We had-- or a couple of days there, I guess, there was talk about some of those one-off deals. And then there was hope for a more comprehensive package.

Yet today, we're still seeing gains across the board, no progress on those stimulus talks. If anything, the chances of it dimming after the developments that we've gotten out over the weekend. So it's interesting when you see such broad-based gains across-- where obviously big tech responsible for a lot of today's rally, but all three of the major averages in the green and the sector action too. Most of the sectors, 10 of the 11 sectors closing to the upside.

ANDY SERWER: Well, it's nice not to be a prisoner, Seana, of the stimulus talks, which we are most days now, no doubt. And I know Akiko thinks the market went up today because of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers. Look at her. She's very happy about that, and maybe she'll talk some about that. But I don't think it had everything to do with LeBron and company.

Jared mentioned the big two today-- tomorrow happenings, which are Amazon Prime Day and Apple's new iPhone. And of course, those two stocks were up huge, and they sort of pulled the rest of the market along with it. It was a weird day because there was sort of a paucity of news, not only nothing on the stimulus, but tomorrow is Prime Day. Tomorrow is the launch for the phone. Tomorrow is bank earnings, right.

So what happens today was kind of a vacuum to the upside. And I think, you know, we shouldn't forget-- I mean, Jared mentioned the financials a little bit there, but this is going to be a big week for them. And it's going to be weird again, because everyone's going to be talking about the new phone and Amazon's billions.

Jeff Bezos is going to become a much more richer man in the world tomorrow or something crazy, right? But the financials, you know, it's a canary kind of situation. It's going to be interesting to watch this week as well.