Strota/ Newsroom/ Global Markets/ 2026-07-31

S&P 500 rose 0.6%

Strota Newsroom · Global Markets · session of 2026-07-31 · market close

S&P 500 closed at 7,478.34 on 2026-07-31, rose 0.6% on the session and is +9.2% year-to-date. Here is what the market data shows.

The S&P 500 finished the 30 July session at 7,437.63, a gain of 1.66% on the day. That was one of the firmer single-day advances in the index's recent run, and it came directly after a sharp decline in the previous session, so much of the move looked like a recovery of ground given up rather than a push into new territory.

That left the index still just below its own recent peak: the close sat 2.26% under the 52-week high of 7,609.78, and 19.23% above the 52-week low of 6,238.01 — the extremes of the past year of trading. The index closed beneath its 50-day moving average of 7,468.79, the rolling average of the last fifty closing levels, which is often read as a short-term trend marker, but comfortably above its 200-day average of 7,019.93. The medium-term picture is mixed in the same way: down 0.82% over the past month, up 4.23% over three months, up 0.4% over the week, and up 8.65% so far in 2026.

Peer markets were broadly higher, though the comparison spans two dates: the US majors last closed on 30 July, while Asian and European markets had already closed 31 July. The Nasdaq led the US majors with 2.78% and the Dow added 1.19%. Europe was far more muted — the FTSE 100 rose 0.22%, the DAX 0.28%, the Euro Stoxx 50 0.63% and the CAC 40 0.78%. In Asia the Nikkei climbed 4.03% while the Hang Seng and Australia's ASX 200 barely moved at 0.1% each; Shanghai added 0.72%, and India's Sensex and Nifty 50 rose 0.21% and 0.27%. The KOSPI at 17.91% and the TAIEX at 7.98% were the largest gains anywhere in the peer set — an exceptional bounce in those two markets, and far beyond the subdued moves recorded across Europe.

News coverage points in the direction of technology. A MarketWatch headline from the session described chip and memory stocks surging while investors digested Microsoft earnings and weighed inflation data against the Federal Reserve's rate stance, and Yahoo Finance reported that Microsoft posted a record one-day gain in market value. Older headlines tell the other half of the story: Reuters and CNBC both reported a sharply lower Wall Street close the day before, after the Fed left rates unchanged. Bloomberg, most recently, reported that traders were positioning for more volatility in the index as macro risks rose. An Investopedia headline about chip stocks dropping dates from 24 July and describes a different week entirely.

What the pack establishes is the size and shape of the move, not its cause. The headlines are consistent with a technology-led rebound, but nothing here quantifies how much of the 1.66% came from any single earnings report, sector or policy signal.

The numbers

Around the world (same session)

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How this article was made: Strota assembled the market data above (the index's price history, same-session peer-market moves and public headlines) and an AI model wrote the narrative strictly from that evidence — it is not permitted to add outside facts or numbers. Every figure comes from the underlying market/public data.