This week Aya Yoshioka covers how gold has been “on a tear” and up almost 14% so far in 2026. Threats of new tariffs on Europe and proposed tax cuts in Japan rattled the markets, but, despite the volatility, the S&P 500 rallied Thursday afternoon to within 1% of all-time highs. Hear Aya’s perspective on these events and more in the video below!

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 7 Market Mover series from Wealth Enhancement. My name is Aya Yoshioka, and I'm a Portfolio Consulting Director and Senior Investment Strategist.

So in these videos, we love to talk about what impacted markets. And this week, we saw some volatility return to markets as a lot of geopolitical headlines grabbed investor attention. First and foremost, we had president Trump talking about US control over Greenland, and threatening additional tariffs on Europe. That caused a lot of investor fear having the Sell America trade reemerge.

Then we had Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi from Japan announce some tax cuts and that sparked investor concern over Japan's already substantial public debt. They had their 40-year bond yield surge to over 4%. It's the first time it hit 4% since its debut in 2007.

And its 30-year bond actually hit 3.88% and that was a 27 basis point surge in one day. That trickled into US treasury markets. And we saw yields on the 10-year US treasury yield go up about 8 basis points on the day, really causing some concern across bond markets.

Well, a lot of this was put to rest when dip buyers returned. So despite the S&P 500 selling off over 2% on the day on Tuesday, the NASDAQ was down over 2%, small caps were down, a lot of equity markets were down quite a bit and bond yields were up, meaning bond prices were down. The one safe haven that we saw was gold. Gold surged 2% on the day and gold has been on a tear in 2026 and has returned over 14% on a year to date basis.

However, dip buyers really returned to the market on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. And as of the close on Thursday, we are within one percent of the all time highs in the S&P 500 again.

So what else has been going on when it comes to economic data?

Well, this week we got some retail sales data and that showed that retail sales grew 0.6% percent during the month of November. A lot of this data has been delayed because of the government shutdown, but that was a positive and really indicated that the US consumer remains very resilient.

We also saw initial jobless claims of about 200,000, essentially unchanged from last week. And it really reflects a labor market that just continues to normalize. We know it's cooling.

The cooling has been gradual and markets can handle all of that, at least at the pace that it's cooling.

And GDP growth, we got a nice estimate from GDP growth for the third quarter of 2025.

GDP grew 4.4% year over year, up from the 4.3% initial estimate, and a lot of this came from stronger exports, alongside a smaller drag from inventories.

Finally, we are in the second week of earning season, and we've had 61 companies within the S&P 500 Index report, mostly banks, but we've seen some other names like some industrials like 3M or consumer names like Netflix report so far. And most of them have had better than expected numbers, but the stock reactions have been mixed.

We get a lot of the big tech names report next week, and that I'm sure will move markets when they report and we'll see what the reaction is. I'm sure everybody's going to be digging into those capital expenditure numbers and where we are in terms of the state of artificial intelligence.

So make sure to tune in to next week's 7 Market Movers, and we'll see you then. Thanks so much for listening.

This information is not intended as a recommendation. The opinions are subject to change at any time and no forecasts can be guaranteed. Investment decisions should always be made based on an investor's specific circumstances. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.

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