NEW YORK (awp international) – The recent good mood on the US stock market continues shortly before Christmas. Strong signals from the US economy and renewed hope in the pandemic caused the market-wide and particularly meaningful S&P 500 to climb towards its record high four and a half weeks ago. He last won 0.67 percent to 4728 points.
The leading index Dow Jones Industrial went up another 0.565 percent on Thursday to 35,956 points. His weekly plus is currently around 1.7 percent. On the last trading day of the week, the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 posted higher gains than the standard value indices, up 0.88 percent to 16,323 meters. Overall, it is the third day in a row with profits for the US stock exchanges. However, many market participants have already closed their books. The US stock exchanges will remain closed on Friday, December 24th.
British studies on the Omicron variant provide some relief. They support the theses from South Africa, according to which the mutant of the coronavirus is far more contagious than the delta variant, but leads to hospital much less often.
Economic data such as durable goods orders, the University of Michigan consumer confidence and data from the housing market came in better than expected. Good economic data had already fueled the recent recovery on Wall Street the day before.
In addition to the studies on Omikron, emergency approvals for pills against Covid provide bright spots in the pandemic. On Wednesday the pharmaceutical company Pfizer had already received the green light for its drug Paxlovid from the US Medicines Agency. This was followed by emergency approval for the agent Molnupiravor from Merck & Co. Pfizer and Merck had posted price gains the previous day, and on Thursday their shares fell sharply in some cases.
Airline stocks benefited from the more hopeful signals in the pandemic. Associated with this is the hope of fewer travel restrictions, under which tourism and the airlines have so far suffered greatly in the corona pandemic. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines prices rose by up to 0.9 percent.
A transaction by Tencent also attracted attention on the US market. The Chinese Internet holding company wants to sell most of its stake in the e-commerce company JD.com. For this purpose, JD shares are to be distributed to Tencent shareholders in the form of a one-time dividend. It remains to be seen whether this is an indicator of further such steps by the holding, wrote the analysts at Barclays. The shares of JD.com, which are listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, lost more than six percent.
The papers of the construction machinery manufacturer Caterpillar expanded their previous day’s profits by 2.3 percent at the top of the Dow index and took course to their interim high from last week.
At Tesla, too, investors continued to take hold. The electric carmaker’s shares rose 5.8 percent to a two-week high. The day before, Group boss Elon Musk had announced that the goal of selling more than ten percent of his shares in Tesla had been achieved. This now has a liberating effect, the selling pressure of the past few weeks is gone./ajx/nas
– .
