It was all about the Federal Reserve overnight with what will likely be the last major economic announcement until close to February next year.
As expected, the central bank will accelerate their tapering of bond purchases to US$30 billion per month, meaning QE will be all but finished by March rather than June.
At the same time, board members of the Fed increased their votes on 2022 rate hikes from one in September to at least three, however, a lot of water will go under the bridge by then.
Inflation expectations were increased from 2.2% to 2.6% and growth expectations cut.
This news came as retail sales numbers slumped, growing just 0.3% in November, well below expectations.
Despite predictions that rate hikes would lead to a market sell-off, all three benchmarks actually reversed losses, the Dow Jones finishing up 1.1%, S&P 500 up 1.6% and Nasdaq up 2.2%.
Electric vehicle makers continue to slump
Company-specific releases have slowed, but the electric vehicle market behind Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) continued to be sold off due to their high growth profiles.
Semiconductor stocks rally
The more cyclical business, even in the tech space, performed well with semiconductor makers, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) up around 8% each.
Featured: A look inside the ETF Securities Semiconductor ETF (ASX: SEMI)
US stock market movers
Here’s how other popular US stocks performed on Thursday.
- Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) up 6.4%
- CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) up 6.0%
- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) up 3.7%
- JD.com (NASDAQ: JD) down 5.1%
- Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU) down 8.0%
- Roblox (NYSE: RBLX) down 9.0%
Back home on the ASX, the S&P/ASX 200 (ASX: XJO) is set to open higher this morning. For a round-up of the latest news, check out my ASX 200 morning report.