Market check: Stocks edge higher in early trading

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre reports on markets opening slightly higher after yesterday's record highs in the Dow and S&P 500.

Video transcript

- It's as we get to the waning days of the year Jared, what stands out to you?

- Waning indeed. So we are not looking at a lot of volume or activity. In the majors, we got some activity beneath the surface. So I thought we'd start with the Wi-Fi interactive heat map on the sector outlook. So this is today, you can see tech is the only sector in the red just barely. That's XKL right there followed by staples, real estate, and discretionary.

To the upside, communication services is leading that houses Alphabet and Facebook then we have energy and financials, materials, industrials. So it's very much a day when value and cyclical seem to be accelerating to the upside. Nevertheless, we're seeing a little bit of weakness in the bond market and this is the seventh day of this rally.

Now, the Santa Claus rally officially started earlier in the week on Monday and so we're on day four of this but day seven of the rally. So I just want to show what the sector action is like and you can see everything in the green to the downside, it's utilities, staple, and health care. Those are the defensive sectors. Those are lagging that's what you want to see in this rally.

To the upside, consumer discretionary. That is the biggest leader that's up. 7.4% that houses Amazon and a bunch of the retail names that we know as well as Tesla because that is a consumer discretionary item as well autos included. That's followed by materials and tech and energy and industrials. All of those up about 6% and that's a pretty healthy mix here.

I don't think we should expect too much in terms of fireworks or anything in the news flow could certainly happen but for the most part, traders are going to be probably fading whatever big moves if there are any. So I wouldn't be too concerned with that.

Do you want to check out the travel sector and this is over the last seven days. So you can see a lot of positive movement there. Want to dial it back to the intraday price action, excuse me one second. And we can see here Carnival Cruise lines just made an announcement and investors kind of discounting it.

It looked like their bookings, they had to revise down and investors kind of shrugged it off, maybe it was priced into the market. Nevertheless, carnival and Norwegian each up about 2 and 1/2 airlines. The airline not faring that badly either. American, Southwest, and United all up under 1% here.

And then taking a look at crypto, I don't know if we've taken a look at this today. Bitcoin coming off of some kind of scary lows here. Not too scary but the price action not looking the most favorable. Will take a 7 day view of this going back to late last week. And you can see the trend once again in the short term to the downside.

Not seeing a lot of other movement here, except in some of the newcomers. Hex, this is a token or what have you that has been on a real tear and up 2,346% year to date, you can see it. It peaked in September along with a number of other cryptos but just some of these newer names that have been tracking this year and especially those that have been accelerating towards the end of the year really capturing the crypto community's attention here.

- Most definitely, it's been a wild one. Thanks so much Jared, I appreciate.