Stocks barely budged in a holiday-shortened session while Treasuries fell, with this month’s rally in global bonds showing signs of stalling.

The S&P 500 closed little changed at 1 p.m. in New York, while notching its fourth straight week of gains. Wall Street’s “fear gauge” — the VIX — dropped to 12.46, the lowest since January 2020. Cryptocurrency-linked shares rallied as Bitcoin rebounded. Nvidia Corp. slid on a news report the company has told customers in China it’s delaying the launch of an artificial-intelligence chip. Ten-year U.S. yields approached 4.5 per cent.

Investors flocked into equities at the fastest pace in almost two years, according to Bank of America Corp.’s Michael Hartnett, as wagers of peak interest rates grow.

Global stock funds have seen inflows of about US$40 billion in the two weeks through Nov. 21, Hartnett wrote in a note, citing EPFR data. Still, cash funds remain the winner with additions of nearly $1.2 trillion so far in 2023, compared with $143 billion into equities, while bond funds broadly registered outflows.

“We had a nice bounce off of an oversold condition at a seasonally appropriate time,” said Steve Sosnick at Interactive Brokers. “It was predicated on the Fed ending its hiking cycle, so that’s OK. But it now seems predicated on a rapid easing cycle, which may require a much worse economy than investors expect.”

In economic news, employment declined at U.S. service providers and manufacturers in November for the first time since mid-2020 amid tepid demand and elevated costs, a survey from S&P Global showed.

Treasuries followed a slide in European bonds that was caused by concerns of burgeoning supply. Germany will suspend a constitutional limit on net new borrowing for a fourth consecutive year after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government was forced into a radical budget overhaul by a ruling last week from the nation’s top court.

“In this early close Black Friday, we open to much higher Treasury yields because of what happened yesterday in Germany,” said Andrew Brenner at NatAlliance Securities. “A court ruling is causing Germany to suspend their debt ceiling, which has led 10-year German Bunds to rise. Other European rates followed, and so have U.S. Treasuries.”

Corporate Highlights:

• Macy’s Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Gennette told Bloomberg Television that the retailer had a “great day online yesterday during Thanksgiving.”
• iRobot Corp., the vacuum-cleaner maker that Amazon.com Inc. is proposing to buy in a billion-dollar deal, soared on a news report that European Union regulators plan to clear the merger.
• Fisker Inc. surged after the electric-vehicle startup filed its delayed third-quarter results, and said it has made a strategic shift to improve the pace of deliveries in the U.S. and Europe.
• Looking into next week’s earnings, Zscaler Inc. and Crowdstrike Holdings Inc. will underscore how businesses are prioritizing cybersecurity after recent high-profile corporate hacks. Salesforce Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc. are expected to post slower sales growth as overall corporate expenditure tightens.
• Elsewhere, OPEC+ is close to resolving a dispute over output quotas that forced the group to postpone a pivotal meeting, as it reviews the demands made on African members by an earlier deal.

Some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

• The S&P 500 was little changed as of 1 p.m. New York time
• The Nasdaq 100 fell 0.1 per cent
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.3 per cent
• The MSCI World index rose 0.1 per cent

Currencies

• The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.3 per cent
• The euro rose 0.3 per cent to $1.0941
• The British pound rose 0.6 per cent to $1.2607
• The Japanese yen was little changed at 149.52 per dollar

Cryptocurrencies

• Bitcoin rose 1.7 per cent to $37,873.5
• Ether rose 1.7 per cent to $2,105.02

Bonds

• The yield on 10-year Treasuries advanced six basis points to 4.47 per cent
• Germany’s 10-year yield advanced two basis points to 2.64 per cent
• Britain’s 10-year yield advanced three basis points to 4.28 per cent

Commodities

• West Texas Intermediate crude fell 1.5 per cent to $75.92 a barrel
• Spot gold rose 0.5 per cent to $2,001.39 an ounce