Wall Street closed out its fifth straight quarterly gain Wednesday, continuing its comeback from a steep drop in early 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
The S&P 500 edged up 0.1%, bringing its advance over the past three months to 8.2% and 14.4% for the first half of the year. The benchmark index finished June with a 2.2% gain and its third straight all-time high as it extended its winning streak to a fifth day.
Chattanooga’s publicly traded companies also enjoyed gains in their stock values during the first half of 2021, adding nearly $5 billion to the eight companies’ collective market value. Six of the eight stock-traded companies with headquarters in the Chattanooga area beat the overall market for gains in the stock market during the first six months of the year. The biggest gainer was the shopping center developer CBL Properties, which filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic in 2020 but announced an agreement with its lenders in March to negotiate its debt repayments. Trucking giants Covenant Logistics and U.S. Xpress also enjoyed healthy gains in their stock values as the economy opened back up this year while disability insurer Unum benefitted by both a stronger economy and better investment earnings.
Stocks have been pushing higher on optimism that the economy is strengthening and that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates low for a while longer.
“The Fed has sort of kept the proverbial spigot open, if you will, with liquidity, so there’s still a pretty sizable amount of capital out there looking for a place to go,” said Randy Frederick, vice president of trading & derivatives at Charles Schwab.