Writing on the Wall

End of a brutal but predictable week for crypto, tech

Wall Street found some relief on Friday as major stock indexes bounced from a brutal week of selling — but markets still ended lower for the sixth consecutive week.

Rattled by a surprisingly stiff monthly inflation number and a cataclysmic selloff in cryptocurrencies this week, investors have grown increasingly concerned whether Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will be able to engineer a soft landing for the US economy with a series of rate hikes in the coming months.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday rose 466.36 points, or 1.47%, to 32,196.66 and the Nasdaq rose 3.8%. Both indexes finished with weekly losses.

The S&P 500 was up 2.4%. The benchmark posted its sixth straight losing week, something that hasn’t happened since 2011.

Technology stocks led the gains. Apple rose 3.2% and Microsoft rose 2.3%.

The sector has been behind much of the broader market’s volatility throughout the week and has been slipping overall as higher interest rates tend to weigh most heavily on the priciest stocks.

Retailers and communications companies also made solid gains. Amazon jumped 5.7% and Google’s parent rose 2.8%.

Jordan Waldrep, the chief information officer for Dallas-based TrueMark Investments, told The Post the market slide is the result of a confluence of factors that create a perfect storm — inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supply-chain disruptions and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“Put it all together and you are vulnerable to a correction,” Waldrep said. “Vulnerable enough to turn the ship and start a sell-off.”

Waldrep said that while he was optimistic for the long term, Wall Street could expect to see more turbulence in the near future.

“I don’t know if we are experiencing an orderly correction or the start of something larger,” he said, adding the Federal Reserve’s hiking of interest rates “pushed the market to take some of the air out of the balloon.”

“As painful as this has been for investors, I think it has been a healthy selloff to date,” he said.

Mark Andraos, an associated portfolio manager at Regency Wealth Management, said the sell-off was the result of the stock market “pricing in significant uncertainty as to whether the Fed can engineer a soft landing and not tip the economy into recession.”