‘Santa Claus rally’ is here — but can the stock market avoid the ‘Grinch pinch’?

The Dow closed slightly higher on Thursday while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 closed lower in the second day of a so-called Santa Claus rally period.

Investors are still sitting on a more than 25% gain for the year, and it’s arguable that the frenzied postelection bump pulled forward some of December’s typical gains. Nonetheless, the month’s anemic showing is atypical.

Stocks have seen a stellar 2024, but the S&P 500 is in danger of a rare December loss. It’s all riding on the so-called Santa Claus rally.

Some of the biggest winners were mega-cap tech stocks, with Tesla up by 6% while Broadcom, Netflix, and Amazon each gained about 2%.

Learn all about the Santa Claus Rally, a seasonal stock market trend with historical significance. Discover why it happens and some tips.

The so-called Santa Claus rally could get off to a late start this year. But better late than never. A team of strategists at Ned Davis Research pointed out that stocks have struggled ahead of the start of the “Santa Claus rally” period, which begins on Tuesday.

Tech giants like Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices continued to power gains on Wall Street in Tuesday’s traditionally truncated session. News the Biden administration had launched a probe into Chinese-made chips—a probe that may continue under Donald Trump—likely helped buttress US tech stocks as the S&P 500 closed up more than 1%.

Since the 1970s, the term “Santa Claus Rally” has been synonymous with rising stock prices during the last five trading days of December and

Wall Street's main indexes all closed higher on Tuesday, with gains in megacap and growth stocks bolstering benchmarks in a truncated Christmas Eve session. Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI and Nasdaq Composite .