Rocket Lab rises for fourth straight session

Retail favorite Rocket Lab is on track for its fourth straight gain Tuesday, riding a fresh wave of investor enthusiasm for the momentum stocks that have set the pace for the market since April.

Writing about such stocks is tricky. As is the case with Rocket Lab today, there’s often little “news” to explain a sudden price jag, which can force us market hacks into the always treacherous terrain of tea leaf reading.

But Rocket Lab’s recent run-up has seemed to coincide with the resurgence in this year’s enthusiasm for so-called momentum stocks that suddenly evaporated last week, as people began to worry about whether the Fed would cut rates in the face of persistently high inflation.

(Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech quickly dispelled those fears.)

Betting on momentum stocks — essentially, stocks that have been going up — has been a moneymaker since President Trump’s tariff announcement tanked the market in April.

Since the April 8 low, Goldman Sachs’ basket of “high beta momentum long” stocks — where Rocket Lab has one of the heaviest weightings, along with other winners this week, like SoFi Technologies — is up some 55%, outpacing a gain of about 29% for the overall market. So it seems like the betting on “big mo” will continue.