The month of November was pretty eventful, as expected. A consensus carried out from 1950 to 2016 shows that November ended up offering positive stock returns in 44 years and negative returns in 23 years, per moneychimp.com, with an average return of 1.38%. But upbeat global economic events help U.S. equity gauges to score even higher this November.
Among the key ETFs, SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY - Free Report) , SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA - Free Report) and PowerShares QQQ ETF (QQQ - Free Report) advanced about 3.2%, 4.1% and 2.4%,respectively, in the last one month (as of Nov 30, 2017).
Let’s find out the key economic events that helped the market to attain such heights.
Solid Start to Holiday Season Shopping: Cyber Monday Tops
With Thanksgiving, the one month-long holiday season kicked-off. And this year, Americans spent profusely on occasions like Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Per Adobe, Cyber Monday touched a new record as the largest online sales day in history with $6.59 billion by the end of the day, up 16.8% year over year.
Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day realized $5.03 billion and $2.87 billion in revenues, respectively. Already $50 billion in online revenues have been generated, up 16.8%. Adobe also predicts that “this will be the first-ever holiday season to break $100 billion in online sales.†Some winning ETFs from this trend were Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY - Free Report) and ETFMG Video Game Tech ETF (GAMR –Free Report) which gained about 2.7% and 3.4%, respectively, in the last one month (as of Nov 29, 2017).
OPEC Output Cut Till Dec 2018
As expected, OPEC and non-OPEC oil behemoth Russia decided to protract oil production cuts until the end of 2018 at the end of November. The deal to reduce oil output by 1.8 million barrels a day was first signed a year ago by the 14-member OPEC cartel, Russia and nine other global producers. This puts oil ETFs like United States Oil Fund (USO - Free Report) and United States Brent Oil (BNO - Free Report) in focus.
