Bulls Rule in 2023, Nvidia's 240% Surge, S&P 500 Hitting 5200 in 2024? 12/29/23

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Market insight and analysis.

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You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

Sara Eisen (0:42)

Good Friday morning, and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Bob Pisani. Today, live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange, Carl, Jim, and David have the morning off. Last trading day of the year, taking a look at futures.

Will we get a record close for the S&P?

Looks like another quiet day. Futures pointing up. Dow futures up 12 points. Dow, by the way, at a record high. Nasdaq 100 also at a record high. Nasdaq Composite down one point here in the pre-market. It's about 6% away from its own record high, but having a banner year up more than 44% so far. Our roadmap begins with the final trading day of 2023 Best year for stocks since 2019 S&P 500 still on the cusp of a record as the stock meltup continues.

Plus, 12 stocks in the S&P 500 gaining more than 100% on the year. We're going to break down the big winners. And oil prices heading for their first losing year since 2020 WTI crude down more than 20% in the fourth quarter alone.

We begin with the markets, though. And there's a lot to say, Bob, about the performance this year, especially in the last month, because we're closing out the month of December and the fourth quarter. It's been a surprisingly eventful and bullish one. I'll just give you one stat. So we're now going to close out our nine week of gains for the S&P and for the NASDAQ, something we haven't seen in unison, according to Bespoke, since 1985

Bob Pisani (2:03)

It's almost two different years. There's everything up until the end of October. And then there's November. And it's very important not to confuse causes and effects. The cause of what has happened in the last two months is the market has come to believe the Federal Reserve is done with its interest rate hikes and that there will be significant amounts of rate cuts occurring next year. The effect of that has been interest rates have declined dramatically since the end of October. That has caused the stock market overall to rise by particularly broadening out on the markets that we've talked about so much. We talked yesterday, small cap stocks moving up, value stocks moving up, consumer staple stocks moving up, underperforming names moving up. One of the only groups that hasn't moved up dramatically, energy stocks, primarily because oil is being held down right now because of great supply in the markets.

One of the last pieces of suspense, Sara, we're going to close at a historic high for the S&P 500 We're just 12, 13, 14 points away from that.

It is a fairly rare event. I talked to Standard & Poor's yesterday about this, for the markets to close on a historic high on the last trading day of the year. Doesn't happen very often here.

Eight times, actually. And there's the numbers here. Thank you, S&P, for providing this to us. 2020, 2013, 1999, 91, 63, 58, 54, and 1928 That's when they started keeping the records for the S&P. There was a 90-stock index.

Sara Eisen (3:27)

So it's happened.

Bob Pisani (3:28)

It's happened eight times. And do the math here, we're talking about 95 years. So that doesn't happen very often. So we'll see if that happens. We have the Santa Claus Rally.

The last five trading days of the old year, the first two of the new year, that is on track as well here. So the last, we've got four days. The S&P is up 0.9% or so in the last four days. We've got three days to go. And that's about on average right now. The average gain on the Santa Claus Rally is about 1.3%. So the seasonal factors are coming in here really strong here.

And just a quick review of the global markets, which you watch so carefully, Sara. It's been a generally good year, ex-China. China is sort of the outlier. We saw Japan have a terrific year, up 28%. The Nikkei is best yearly gain in a decade. It's the big winner over in Asia. We also saw nice gains in Europe globally, up about 13%.