Market check: Stocks open higher, ARKK extends gains, Russell to rebalance indices

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre breaks down how markets opened on Friday.

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live on this Friday, everyone. Taking a look at the major averages, we are up across the board, hoping to have an up week as well. Let's get on over to Yahoo Finance's own Jared Blikre on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Jared, what are you seeing down there?

JARED BLIKRE: I'm seeing a pretty constructive week so far. As we know, being in a bear market, we've got to add the disclaimer that this can reverse on a dime with a bad data print or something that Powell might say. But looking at the S&P 500 here on the YFi Interactive, we're up 1% for the day. I want to go to our heat maps here because I want to paint the picture that we're seeing for the week.

Here's what's happening today. We got tech, communication services, and consumer discretionary, the three sectors that house the mega caps, those are leading. Let's take a look at what's happened over the last five days. We're seeing a lot of action in consumer discretionary. That's XLY. XLK is tech. XLV is healthcare. More on that in a second. Real estate, communication services, all those perking up. So the generals, which really fell a lot-- maybe they haven't fallen enough-- they're perking up here.

Let me show you what's happening to our leaders. If you take a look at what's happened over the last five days, Ark is up 21%. IPO, that Renaissance IPO ETF, that's up 18%. Solar energy up 12%. Biotech, that's up 12% as well. And then finally, software, IGV is up 10%. If we go to the software space, we're going to see a lot of perking up of some names that have been extremely depressed. Vroom is up 41%. Zen-- I think we were just talking about that-- up 37%. MDB-- there we go. MDB, 28. SNOW up 28. The list goes on here.

So we're seeing some positive action in a lot of our leaders. And we want it to continue. We're not necessarily seeing it pick up in the indices just yet. But that could happen. That could follow next week. We'll have to see, guys.

JULIE HYMAN: Jared, let's talk about Russell rebalancing for a moment. And just to refresh our viewers' memories in terms of what we're talking about when we're talking about rebalancing, there are big indices, right? Russell has a bunch of them. And once a year, they, quote unquote, "rebalance them." They try to take out some members. They put in other members. And a lot of money tracks versus those indices. So when those changes happen, we tend to see a lot of index providers, or index trackers, I should say, also making the changes.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. And the S&P, by the way, the S&P indices did this one week ago. These are very high volume days. The changes are going to take place Monday morning. So in effect, everything is happening at the close today. So it's very important to track what these high volume days mean for the market because we are in the midst of the summer. After today, we're probably not going to have a lot of liquidity, any high liquidity days until after Labor Day, when traders get back into the market.

Given the fact that we have ongoing balance sheet reduction, and we have a Fed that's very hawkish, it just means that the moves could be more exaggerated not only to the downside, but also to the upside. So in line with some of the writing that I believe I wrote this in the "Morning Brief" yesterday, the rallies that we get at this point in a bear market tend to be flashier than normal. And just given the illiquid conditions in the market, I think that's going to continue.

For today, the fact that we do have this Russell rebalance going on, a lot of traders are in the market here, a lot of traders who ordinarily would have been on vacation, because it is a Friday in the summer, are going to be here. Point is, they're not going to be here next week maybe.

JULIE HYMAN: Maybe not. So we'll see what that means for the action. In the meantime, volume today probably going to be elevated because of what you're talking about. Maybe a flashy rally, indeed. Thanks so much, Jared. Appreciate it.