) closed out Wednesday trading in positive territory with the Nasdaq Composite taking the lead and rising by 0.57%. Although the US Labor Department revealed that, for the 12 months through March 2024, 818,000 fewer jobs were created than expected, markets continue to persist.
Not that, that is a shock, but still the confirmation of that somewhat reassuring to market participants.Maybe I thought I saw you playing around looking at the Russell ahead of time because we saw out performance from the Small Caps today.Look, let me show you a two day look of the Russell and you can see it just kind of took off after about 1 p.m. yesterday.Very unusual or slightly unusual to see the VICS trending up with stocks.
But I think they were looking for confirmation that they've got inflation under control and we've seen a number of prints recently that confirmed that inflation numbers are coming down and there was a pivot towards focus on the labor market and the fact that there was vulnerability there. Laura, do you think though that the FED is going to continue to be data dependent although maybe less inflation, data dependent now and more labor market dependent?No, they have to remain data dependent.
Uh we still are a little overweight on equities because we do think that there's a bit more room to run here. So all of those uh potentially provide the opportunity that they re release some of those reserves as well.But at the margin, we do think that there's room to run there for fixed up income investors.Well, first of all, we think fixed income is going to be the most important part of the portfolio to get right over the coming years.
We have more questions about Zoom's A I initiatives uh with its so called A I companion helps like draft emails and summarize, summarize meetings as well.Yeah, the shares, by the way are down about 16% year to date, about 10% over the past 12 months.There is perhaps no other company so synonymous with the pandemic and being a Peloton in there though, I think Zoom even more.The, the idea of video calling being much more part of our daily lives, our business lives.
Those real estate prices have come down and that's really weighed on the domestic consumption story in China. Yeah, I think, and ultimately Walmart and particularly Sam's Club are doing very well in China and, you know, they've made this partnership over eight years ago, this investment in, in JD and ultimately Walmart is doing so well that they no longer need a partner.Um not only just on uh offline traditional retail stores, but with Sam's Club and their e-commerce efforts.
Do we also see them sort of becoming more independent and strengthening, you know, early on Julie, the government really required uh many of these Western companies and American companies to have a local partner, say General Motors with S A IC, a big automaker there, they were kind of forced to do AJ DJ, a joint venture.You have companies like Tesla operating independently in China without a partner.
And again, the fall in real estate prices as well as the conservatism of the Chinese consumer because of this, you know, proverbial scar tissue, I mean, people have money, they're just being very conservative in spending it. But I think a broader fiscal policy on consumption is coming, they've just been very hesitant to create more debt, potentially create inflation by giving away free money.
But I think I think you need the consumer to come back here just because we we anticipate export driven, manufacturing is going to slow.They, they saw the effects of free money policies in the West, the amount of debt and inflation it created.And again, I think as readers of the Chinese economy, we're seeing some amplification of policy as well as acknowledgment of the issue.Brendan final question on politics, you know, um interesting, I I don't know how Harris her views on China.
This coming after the Bureau of Labor Statistics, remember revised down net payroll gains for the 12 months ended last March by eight 18,000 and finally the 2024 Jackson Hole economic symposium kicks off tomorrow with the revised jobs data has shown a weaker than expected labor market.
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