No Santa Claus rally, but hope remains for more upside in 2025

Eyes on upcoming US economic data, jobs report, and signals from the Fed

- Ven Sreenivasan

The fat chap in a red outfit didn't turn up, and there were no sounds of sleighs or bells either. The Santa Claus rally, which typically runs through the final five days of the year and the first two days of the new year, did not materialize. Dec 24, 2024 marked the start of the window. Stocks were either flat or down for at least the first four days of the "Santa run".

Though things could still turn around if data sets for January, such as the upcoming US job numbers, are encouraging, the euphoria which swept over the market in late November and into early December seems to have cooled somewhat.

Of course, the holiday calendar accounted for much of the poor performance as Christmas Day and New Year's Day were back-to-back mid-week Wednesdays, creating two "dead trading weeks" (in market parlance) coming into the first week of January 2025.

Despite the recovery on Jan 3, the three major Wall Street indexes ended in the red for the week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up 0.6 per cent to 42,732.13 points over the holiday-shortened week, while the S&P 500 slipped 0.48 per cent over four trading sessions to 5,942.47 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq slid 0.51 per cent to 19,621.68 points.

In Singapore, the Straits Times Index (STI) rose 30.2 points or 0.8 per cent over the past week, closing at 3,801.83 on Jan 3.

Energy and offshore engineering giant Seatrium was the top index gainer, rising 6.8 per cent over the past four sessions since Dec 27 to close out a post-stock consolidation high at $2.19 on Jan 3.

Other outperformers during the week included Thai Beverage (up 3.6 per cent), CapitaLand Ascendas Real Estate Investment Trust (up 2.7 per cent), CapitaLand Investment (up 2.7 per cent) and Mapletree Logistics Trust (up 2.4 per cent). The STI stocks that declined the most for the week were Jardine Matheson, Venture Corp, Singtel, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Singapore Airlines.