The U.S. equity markets began last week on a positive note led by easing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, a ceasefire agreement in Gaza and some encouraging corporate news as well. However, geopolitical developments remained the dominant market driver and major benchmark indexes shed some of their earlier week gains on Friday following fresh conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine forces partly destroyed a Russian armored column after it entered Ukrainian soil.
Nonetheless, benchmarks recorded their second straight week of gains and all the three major benchmark indices closed the week on green, with the Dow up 0.7%, the S&P 500 gaining 1.2% and the tech laden Nasdaq climbing 2.2%. A recovering U.S. economy, improving corporate earnings picture and a strengthening jobs market led the U.S. markets higher despite the ongoing geopolitical tensions.
Notably, the Q2 earnings season has been quite reassuring; the pace of negative revisions for this quarter as well as for the upcoming quarters has been quite low this time. This is in stark contrast to previous quarters when negative revisions were a recurrent theme.
Moreover, worries about the timing of an interest rate hike continued to plague investors. Though most believe the hike to come in mid-2015, some of the bullish economic data out recently raised speculations of an earlier-than-expected rate hike.
On the global front, the Euro-zone GDP came in on the weaker side further confirming that the region's economy is losing momentum. Also, a consumption tax hike in April led the Japanese economy to shrink 6.8% at an annual rate during Q2.
Given the mixed sentiments, most of the ETFs emerged as winners last week, while a few products also slumped to close the week on a negative note. Below, we have highlighted some of the big gainers and losers from the week:
Top Gainers
UBS E-TRACS Alerian MLP Infrastructure ETN (ETF:MLPI) – Up 6.24%
Most of the MLP ETFs numbered among the top gainers last week, thanks to Kinder Morgan Inc's (NYSE: p>
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