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New York (AFP) – The New York Stock Exchange opened higher on Monday, on the eve of a busy week in corporate results and pending a monetary decision from the Fed next week.
The Dow Jones index gleaned 0.17%, the Nasdaq gained 0.93% and the S&P 500 0.46% around 3:00 p.m. GMT.
On Friday, posting its best session since the beginning of the year, the technology sector carried Wall Street. The Nasdaq jumped 2.66%, the Dow Jones advanced 1.00% and the broader S&P 500 index 1.89%.
“There should be some movement this week as we’re inundated with earnings and key macro indicators like Thursday’s first estimate of fourth quarter GDP growth, new home sales and Friday’s household spending and the PCE index, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation,” summarized Patrick O’Hare of Briefing.com.
For growth, analysts predict a slight slowdown in the expansion of the world’s largest economy from October to December to 2.6% against 3.2% in the previous quarter.
As for the central bank (Fed), which meets on January 31 and February 1, it could slow its rate hike to a quarter of a percentage point against half a point in December, according to indications from members of the Monetary Committee on Friday.
On the front of the micro-economy, no less than 11 member companies of the Dow Jones index, or a third of them, will publish their quarterly and often annual results this week.
From Tuesday, Johnson and Johnson, 3M, General Electric and Microsoft are expected. On Wednesday, investors will watch for Boeing and Tesla.
On the values side, Salesforce was sought (+ 1.99%) around 3:00 p.m. GMT after the announcement of a sharp increase in participation in the IT group from the activist investment fund Elliott Management.
Elliott now has a stake of “several billion dollars” in the capital of the software group, a close source said, which would represent a major investment compared to its participation so far.
The title of online furniture sales site Wayfair soared almost 25% to 58.37 dollars after its decision to cut costs and its workforce resulted in a favorable rating from banking analysts.
The group, very prosperous in the United States during the pandemic, announced on Friday that it was going to shed 10% of its staff, or 1,750 jobs. The action had already gained 20% in the wake of this announcement.
The electronic payment site Paypal yielded almost 0.22% following information from the Wall Street Journal stating that major American banks, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, are preparing a new payment service of this type.
Investors reacted modestly to the announcement of an expansion of a partnership between Microsoft and the specialist in artificial intelligence OpenAI, creator of the conversational robot ChatGPT with an investment of “several billion dollars”. Microsoft shares advanced 0.39% to $241.09 around 3:00 p.m. GMT.
Tesla gained 3.90% to $138.67 pending its results on Wednesday and as its boss Elon Musk returns to the stand in San Francisco on Monday during the trial where he is accused of fraud by investors for having tweeted more than four years ago he planned to take the automaker out of the stock market.
The founder of the electric car manufacturer, also the boss of Twitter, since the takeover of the social network in October, also announced at the end of the week, an upcoming “more expensive” but “ad-free” Twitter subscription.
The semiconductor manufacturer AMD jumped almost 7% after a good note from banking analysts also affecting Qualcomm (+4.85%).
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