Stock market news for June 20, 2024

Gilead Sciences headed for its best day since 2022 after its HIV prevention drug succeeded in a late-stage trial.

The stock popped nearly 9%. If that holds through session close, it would mark the best day since later October 2022, when the stock jumped almost 13%.

Thursday’s pop comes after the company’s twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV was 100% effective in its third phase of the trial. Gilead now needs to replicate the results before seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

— Alex Harring, Angelica Peebles

The Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) is at risk of posting a bearish “outside day” on Thursday if it closes below 17,796.88.

The tech-heavy index turned negative in intraday trading after hitting an all-time high early in the session, putting it on pace to break a seven-day winning streak, its longest since a nine-day rally in December.

Giants like NVIDIA (NVDA), Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) and Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) hit all-time highs this morning before turning negative. Both NVDA and CDNS are also pacing for outside days as of mid-afternoon trading.

An “outside day” is a two-day technical trading pattern in which the second day’s trading range fully engulfs the prior day’s range. Traders often use this pattern to predict reversals in an asset’s direction.

— Nick Wells

Nvidia has ascended to being the biggest of the tech giants, surpassing Microsoft earlier this week. The stock markets of several major world markets are also in the rearview mirror.

Deutsche Bank pointed out in its “chart of the day” that Nvidia’s market cap is bigger than the total value of the stock markets in each of France, Germany and the U.K., as measured in US dollars.

In fact, Nvidia’s market cap is bigger than the value of every individual stock market except India, Japan, China and the U.S., according to Deutsche Bank.

— Jesse Pound

U.S. stocks have benefited from a “steady flow [of] support” from declines in short selling over the past year, according to a JPMorgan note to clients on Thursday.

“One support for the U.S. equity market over the past year emanated from a decline in the short interest on the two biggest equity ETFs,” the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and the Invesco QQQ Trust that tracks the performance of the Nasdaq-100 index, strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote. “[T]his short interest has been declining in a rather steady manner since the second quarter of 2023 making successive record lows,” they said.

Lower levels of short selling have helped boost prices “as short positions were gradually covered,” the bank said.

Short interest as a percentage of outstanding shares in the SPY and QQQ ETFs is close to 7% today, down from roughly 14% to 16% around the time of the regional bank crisis in the first half of 2023, a JPMorgan chart using data from S3 Capital showed.

— Scott Schnipper

Investors hoping for small cap stocks to make a comeback could be in for further disappointment, according to RBC Capital Markets head…