S&P 500 hits record high, consumer sentiment rises
The S&P 500 (^GSPC) and Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) are hitting fresh record highs on renewed trade deal hopes. Also giving stocks a boost is the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment, which rose 16% in June. Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Allie Canal reports on the latest market action.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts here.
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Yahoo
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$1,000 in SPY Could Turn Into $2 Million
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SPY is the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEMKT: SPY), the original index-tracking exchange-traded fund (ETF) that spawned an industry of index-tracking ETFs. It follows the S&P 500, which means it also has about 500 components weighted according to market cap. Like the index, its top five stocks are Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. Investing in this ETF gives investors access to the market without having to figure out which stocks to buy, providing exposure to a broad range of the largest U.S. companies while minimizing risk. It's an ETF that has earned investors' trust over time, and it has an expense ratio of 0.09%, which means you're not paying a huge manager's fee for someone to actively manage your fund. Most fund managers underperform the market in a given year, anyway. 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Over 30 years, compounding at a rate of 10%, which is what it has gained on an annualized basis since launching in 1993, you would have about $17,500. However, if you can put aside $1,000 to invest monthly for 30 years, and you start out with $10,000, you'll have more than $2 million. If you don't have $10,000 to start, or if you have a different timeline to invest, your results will look different. For example, if you only have $1,000 to start, you'd still come out with close to $2 million after 30 years. If you only have 20 years before you need your money, you'd come out with more than $750,000. But you would still become a millionaire if you simply save $1,000 monthly and invest it in SPY for 23 years. Can you beat the market and achieve even greater results than this? You can, and many individual investors succeed by having a diversified portfolio of excellent stocks. However, in addition to that, owning SPY gives investors the opportunity to grow along with the market, minimizing some of the risk associated with owning fewer stocks. It's a great strategy for most investors. Before you buy stock in SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $713,547!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $966,931!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,062% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 177% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . 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Top Wall Street analysts like these 3 dividend stocks for enhanced returns
The S&P 500 rose to a fresh record on Friday, but macro uncertainties persist. Investors may want to consider dividend-paying stocks as a way to enhance returns in the event of choppy markets. Tracking the stock picks of top Wall Street analysts can help investors select attractive dividend stocks, given that these experts assign their ratings after an in-depth analysis of a company's fundamentals and its ability to generate solid cash flows to consistently pay dividends. Here are three dividend-paying stocks, highlighted by Wall Street's top pros, as tracked by TipRanks, a platform that ranks analysts based on their past performance. Fast-food chain McDonald's (MCD) is this week's first dividend pick. The company offers a quarterly dividend of $1.77 per share. With an annualized dividend of $7.08 per share, MCD stock offers a dividend yield of 2.4%. 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Just buy the dip: Brave investors have been rewarded during a turbulent first half of 2025
Buying stocks when the market is selling off is always a daunting prospect. On one hand, if you time it right and shares rally, you've bought at an attractive price. On the other hand, the market could just… keep falling. Luckily for brave dip-buyers in 2025, the former has been true. Despite stomach-churning volatility at the index and single-stock level, what's gone down has largely come back up. There's been a series of sharp drops this year that have all ultimately wound up as ideal buying opportunities. Fast-forward through all the madness and you have an S&P 500 cruising at record highs as the first half of 2025 winds down. Wild swings in the S&P 500 The most pronounced and sharp decline in US stocks this year — and therefore the best dip-buying opportunity — came after Liberation Day on April 2. The S&P 500 tanked 12% in a matter of days. But then it ended up recovering the whole drawdown within a month. At that point, the market was still down for the year, having been dragged lower by general tariff uncertainty for much of February and March. In the end, it was continued progress on the trade front that dug the S&P 500 out of its year-to-date hole. In early May, the US struck an initial deal with the UK, before agreeing a with China a couple weeks later to implement a 90-day pause. The most recent major development came last week when Trump said a deal had been reached with China, the same day of a new S&P 500 record high. Art Hogan, managing director and chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, partially attributes the rally off lows to immense retail-investor interest. "I think retail investors have been hardwired now to look at this market for significant pullbacks, big buying opportunities, and thus far, they've been proven correct," Hogan told BI. Data from Vanda Research supports the idea, showing that retail traders aggressively bought exposure to the S&P 500, as well as popular stocks Tesla and Nvidia (more on them later). One phenomenon that's also helped fuel dip-buying the year has been the so-called TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea is that any trade-policy-driven market sell-off will soon be reversed, because the president will backtrack on a policy proposal if investors rebel. But all of that was not enough to lift the S&P 500 to the new heights it's currently enjoying. The last leg higher has been driven by the positive geopolitical developments: an Israel-Iran ceasefire and the neutralization of Iranian nuclear assets by the US. Tesla's roller coaster ride Dip-buying success has also been on display at the single-stock level, particularly for ever-popular and particularly-volatile Tesla. The EV-maker's stock tumbled nearly 50% from highs around the time of Trump's inauguration through the start of March. The main driving forces were falling global vehicle sales and skepticism around CEO Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration. After bottoming on April 8, shortly after Liberation Day, the stock then embarked up a steep — albeit choppy-at-times — 63% recovery. Then Musk and Trump played out a bitter feud for the public, with the president threatening at one point to pull the Tesla CEO's government contracts. The stock fell 14% in a single day. Based on the recovery since, that was just another ideal dip-buying opportunity, as Musk said he'd be stepping away from government work. Sure, the stock is still down 21% year-to-date, but it's up more than 10% since the Musk-Trump dispute. Nvidia: From steep losses to record highs Not even the darling of the AI trade has been insulated from the volatility that's rocked markets this year. Nvidia started the year battling the rise of China's DeepSeek and its cheaper machine-learning model, which challenged long-held notions about how much money will be poured into AI. It experienced the biggest decline in company history on Jan. 27, falling 17% in a single session. But after bottoming out in early February, shares rallied as much as 20% heading into Nvidia's first-quarter earnings report. The company followed the trend of the market lower into April, amid concerns that Trump's proposed tariffs would slow economic growth, falling 33% to its year-to-date low. But it's pretty much been a straight ascent since, the perfect scenario for intrepid dip-buyers that kept the faith during a rocky first quarter. The company has most recently overtaken record highs yet again, and Wall Street can't get enough. One firm boosted its price target on the stock to $250, implying an eventual $6 trillion valuation.
