Stocks move lower in last trading day of May

As the month of May comes to an end, Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre breaks down the biggest market movers of the month.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome to Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Seana Smith along with Diane King Hall. Let's get you up to speed on the market action. The final trading day of May. And you're looking at losses across the board. The Dow off just about 123 points. S&P off about a half of a percent. The NASDAQ, which has been by far the outperformer for the month of May, on track to close up the month just over 6%. That's actually in the red this afternoon, off just about 4/10 of a percent.

Well, we are an hour away from wrapping up the month of May trading here. Jared Blikre is on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with a closer look as some of the biggest movers that we've seen over the last several weeks. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Yes. Well, Seana, you nailed it. It's really been all about the tech trade in May. Let's go straight to the YFi Interactive so we can plot exactly the disparity that has evolved here. So here's the Dow. You can see just about everything in the red today. But here's the Dow over the last 22 days, which is the number of trading days in May, down 3 and 1/2%.

And by the way, the S&P 500 barely positive here. I'm going to skip right to the NASDAQ. NASDAQ is up almost 6%. And you'll probably see some statistics after the close. Well, we haven't seen the NASDAQ outperform the Dow by this much in 20 years, in 40 years. I would expect a lot of that. It's been a while. Suffice to say that this doesn't happen usually. This is not the norm. And we're in a very-- let's call it a special situation.

Now, I want to go to our sectors and see what they've done for the month. Not surprisingly, tech in the forefront. It is up 9%. That's followed by communication services and discretionary. All three of those are the mega-cap sectors. So not a big surprise there. But energy. Energy down 10%. Materials down almost 7%. Just about everything that wasn't a growth or mega-cap, that has been down.

And we've seen it really in the forefront if you take a look at what's happened with the semiconductors. And it looks like the YFi Interactive is slowing down a little bit. But if we take a look at that, we're going to see the outsized gains not only of NVIDIA, but let's not forget other stocks like Marvell and AMD catching up as well. All of this just kind of a recap on the month.

I'd be remiss if we didn't look forward to June. June has not the best seasonality. It's one of the weaker months of the year. And, of course, we're still in the middle of summer. We're not expecting any big liquidity days if, for instance, you had a huge position on and you wanted to flip it or you wanted to do something else. You're going to have to wait until there's liquidity in the market. That's going to come on the Russell rebalance date. But that's only in a few weeks.

Other than that, we don't have a lot of big liquidity drivers here. And plus, we got that big Fed meeting. We'll probably see some liquidity around that Fed decision in a couple of weeks. So just to round this discussion out, I do have on the YFi Interactive finally our plot of S&P 500 index seasonality for the month of June. And you can see it's down there. And that's after a May that is usually flat. And as I like to say, it's not sell in May and go away. It's hedge in May and go away. That's what a lot of the big players want to do. They don't want to come back here. They want to stay at the beach, guys.

SEANA SMITH: They do want to stay at the beach. I'm one of them. But we will see what the month of June brings. All right. Jared Blikre, thanks so much.