Last night, the Storage Sector experienced a sharp downturn against the trend, while the Nasdaq Composite Index recorded a 5.19% cumulative increase for the week.

August 8th - The U.S. stock market closed higher on Friday, with all three major indexes posting gains. The S&P 500 hit a new all-time high, while the Nasdaq rose over 1%. However, the storage sector showed weakness, drawing market attention.

At the close, the S&P 500 rose by 0.62%, setting a new closing record high; the Nasdaq Composite rose by 1.3%; the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 0.28%. For the week, the Dow gained 2.96%, the Nasdaq gained 5.19%, and the S&P 500 rose by 3.58%, marking the largest weekly gains since mid-April.

Large-cap tech stocks generally rose, with NVIDIA and Tesla up over 2%, while Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta posted slight gains. SpaceX surged over 15% as the market believed there was no significant sell-off after the company's first large-scale stock unlocking, while long-term growth expectations improved.

Fueled by the rise in precious metal prices, U.S. gold stocks surged collectively. Coeur Mining rose by over 11%, Kinross Gold and Harmony Gold jumped more than 9%, and Newmont and Barrick Gold saw gains of over 7%. The optical communication sector also performed strongly, with Coherent rising by over 13% and Applied Optoelectronics up by 9%.

In contrast to the overall market gains, the storage sector experienced widespread declines. Seagate Technology plummeted by over 4%, while Western Digital, SanDisk, SK Hynix ADR fell by over 3%, and Micron Technology dropped by 0.44%. Notably, Jefferies slashed SanDisk's 12-month target price from $3000 to $1750, and Citigroup also reduced SanDisk's target price from $2500 to $2100.

The market rally was mainly driven by two factors. Firstly, the unexpected negative turn in U.S. July nonfarm payrolls weakened market expectations of a September Federal Reserve policy tightening. CME Group's FedWatch data shows that the probability of a rate hike at the Fed's next meeting has dropped to about 44%, lower than before.

Secondly, the U.S. earnings season remained strong. So far, 436 companies in the S&P 500 have reported their earnings, with 85.1% of them beating analyst expectations, well above the long-term average.