Stocks Hit New Highs as Jobs Data Mutes Rate Hike Talk: Stock Market Today

Global business stock market rising chart and financial data numbers. — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Investors, traders and speculators pushed interest rates lower and stocks higher after softer-than-expected incoming data suggested there's little if any inflation pressure from the labor market right now. Risk-on momentum held up during a relatively quiet early August trading session, and two of the three main equity indexes made all-time weekly closing highs at its end.

Traders in the federal funds rate futures market took the odds of a rate hike at the September Federal Open Market Committee Meeting (FOMC) from 55% on Thursday to 45% following the release of the July jobs report before the opening bell on Friday.

The front-month West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contract was down 0.5% to $76.94 per barrel. WTI was down 9.1% this week, as interested parties continue to seek solutions to open the Strait of Hormuz acceptable to both Iran and the U.S.

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The 2-year Treasury yield retreated to 4.195% today from 4.245% on Thursday. The market-based measure of short-term monetary policy intentions was down 10 basis points this week from 4.291% last Friday.

The 10-year was down to 4.641% from 4.670% yesterday and 4.745% last week, and the 30-year fell to 5.192% vs 5.212% and 5.275%. There was no immediate reaction at the longer end of the yield curve to President Donald Trump reviving his effort to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

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Markets will look forward to next week's economic calendar and the release of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) data for July before the opening bell on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.

At the closing bell on Friday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had added 1.3% for the day and 5,2% for the week to 26,690. The broad-based S&P 500 was up 0.6% and 3.6% to 7,757, an all-time high, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 0.3% and 3.0% to 54,036, an all-time weekly closing high.

SPCX didn't go down today

SpaceX (SPCX, +15.8%) has had a historically bad flight in the aftermath of the biggest IPO in stock market history, opening at $150 on June 12 and rising to $225.64 intraday on June 16, but falling to an all-time low of $104.83 on Monday.

Management reported expectations-beating second-quarter results after the closing bell on Tuesday, but SPCX was down 13.6% on Wednesday. The fact that Elon Musk's extraterrestrial venture posted a gain today is noteworthy because it marks the end of a four-week losing streak.

Indeed, SPCX was up 22.8% this week. According to JP Morgan analyst Arun Jain, retail investors are into SpaceX to the tune of approximately $3.6 billion since June 12.

The stock is going to be volatile as more supply of shares come to the market during what will be an extended series of lock-up expirations. We'll see whether there's demand to meet that supply over the coming months.

DOCS gets a big assist from AI

Officially, Doximity (DOCS, +32.6%) is a healthcare stock. That's just what S&P Global says, though. Today, it's trading on AI. And the trading is good.

DOCS closed at $20.66 on Thursday but traded as high as $64.99 in the pre-market on Friday and peaked at $39.99 during the regular session before closing at $27.40.

That's despite the fact that management missed Wall Street's second-quarter revenue and earnings forecast and came up short of analysts' consensus top-line estimate for the third quarter.

This move was all about the conference call and how Doximity appears to be differentiating from other software stocks. "We're the doctors' digital platform," CEO Jeff Tangney said, "and AI is just the next chapter in our growth."

Management noted that the Doximity Ask AI outperformed Anthropic’s Fable 5 and other models in a recent study of medical AI tools conducted by Stanford and Harvard. Tangney noted too that usage rates for Doximity’s tools have surged during the current quarter.

The CEO also emphasized that Doximity shows it's possible to generate strong software margins while investing in AI. "We’re leaning in as we see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the new AI age of medicine."

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David Dittman is the former managing editor and chief investment strategist of Utility Forecaster, which was named one of "10 investment newsletters to read besides Buffett's" in 2015. A graduate of the University of California, San Diego, and the Villanova University School of Law, and a former stockbroker, David has been working in financial media for more than 20 years.