Friday, May 22nd, 2026
We look to open the final trading day for the week higher, after a Thursday session in the green that brought the blue-chip Dow to all-time closing highs. Promises of an end to the war in Iran joins anticipation over the pending SpaceX IPO, which is expected to blow away all other market launches with a reported $2 TRILLION market cap. The Dow is up another +340 points, the S&P 500 is +28, the Nasdaq +106 and the small-cap Russell 2000 is +17 points currently.
It was a quieter week of earnings reports, even with NVIDIA NVDA and Walmart WMT having put out quarterly numbers Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. We also saw economic reports that, while less “important” than the CPI Inflation Rate we saw a week ago or the Jobs Week coming a couple weeks from now, helped illustrate where we are on the housing front and in consumer outlook.
Economic Report Rundown: Housing and Consumer Trends
Homebuilder confidence improved slightly for May, but off dismal levels from the prior month — when the realities of the Iran war had begun to cumulatively take hold. Pending Home Sales for April came in higher than estimates, but still down a tad month over month. Housing Starts and Building Permits only saw growth on Multi-family; Single-family homebuilding remained recessed for the month.
May S&P Services and Manufacturing reports yesterday moved in opposing directions, but likely not what you’d think: Services dipped 10 basis points (bps) to 50.9 — still holding onto that above-50 threshold for now — while Manufacturing saw a boost up to 55.3, nicely higher than the projected 53.7 and up 80 bps month over month.
After today’s opening bell, we’ll get the final print on U.S. Consumer Sentiment for May from the University of Michigan household survey. Initially, we saw an all-time low 48.2 — only the second straight sub-50 level in this index’s 74-year history. Consumer Sentiment is -3.21% month over month and -7.66% year over year, as ever-increasing gasoline prices have put a dent into the middle-class (and working class) economies, without yet seeing actual light at the end of this tunnel.
In honor of Memorial Day on Monday, stock markets will be closed. Thus, Zacks’ Ahead of Wall Street will take a breather that day, as well. The final trading days of the month await us; May has been decent but flattish compared to April’s impressive surge. We’ll also have a new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, who gets sworn in at the White House today. Outgoing Fed Chair Jerome Powell plans to stay on the FOMC as a Fed governor, at least for now.
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