US market has managed to overcome the weakness caused by Moody’s decision

The basis for the start of today‘s session in the United States was laid by Moody‘s statement made on Friday after the market closed. The agency downgraded the US credit rating from Aaa to Aa, citing rising government debt and the ratio of interest payments to GDP, which are significantly higher than other sovereign issuers with a similar rating.

This caused a sharp rise in yields on long-term treasury bonds, a 1.0% decline in the dollar index, and a wave of sales in the stock futures market. The yield on 10–year government bonds, which ended Friday‘s session at 4.44%, rose to 4.56%, while the yield on 30–year securities rose from 4.90% to 5.04%. Then the sell-off stopped: by the close, 10–year bonds had returned to 4.47%, and 30—year bonds to 4.94%.

The shares, in turn, received support due to interest in buying on drawdowns and continued optimism about the likely adoption by Congress of a large-scale budget consolidation bill. The dollar index decreased by 0.7%. After the shock of Moody‘s decision subsided, market participants concluded that the downgrade was not a complete surprise, as S&P and Fitch had done so earlier.

This perception apparently contributed to the closing of short positions in the bond market, which spread to the stock market, where the S&P 500 index recorded its sixth consecutive positive session.

There was little fundamental corporate news on Monday, as the day was marked by macroeconomics and technical factors. JPMorgan Chase (JPM 264.94, -2.58, -1.0%) slightly raised its net interest income forecast for 2025; Walmart (WMT 98.14, -0.10, -0.1%) was publicly criticized by President Trump, who called on the company to “take on tariffs“; CEO and CFO UnitedHealth Group (UNH 315.89, +23.98, +8.2%) bought shares of the company worth about $30 million; and JPMorgan downgraded Netflix‘s rating (NFLX 1191.64, +0.11, +0.01%) to “neutral“ from “above market“.

Seven sectors of the S&P 500 ended the day with gains. The healthcare sector became the leader (+1.0%), followed by the consumer goods sector (+0.4%). The energy sector looked worse than the market (-1.6%), becoming the only one to lose more than 0.3%. The balance of supply and demand in the market improved during the session, but by the close it still remained in favor of sellers on both the NYSE and Nasdaq. The only important statistic from the macroeconomic data was published on Monday — the index of leading economic indicators for April. It decreased by 1.0% (forecast -0.7%) after a downward revision of the March value (-0.8% instead of -0.7%).

Our FTinvest 11 portfolio also opened trading with a slight decline, but recovered quite quickly and soon went into positive territory, returning above 730. As a result, the total gain for the day was 0.5%, the index closed at 733.44.