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NEW YORK (awp international) – On Wednesday, the US stock exchanges noticeably reduced their significant losses at the start of trading for another day in a row. And this time too, the best-known Wall Street index, the Dow Jones Industrial, managed to jump into the black. At the opening, the outlook from the software giant Microsoft in particular spoiled the mood of investors and some other large corporations had disappointed with their annual reports.
The Dow ended the day up 0.03 percent to 33,743.84 points. The market-wide S&P 500 reduced its minus to 0.02 percent and thus to 4016.22 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 ended a small 0.27 percent discount to 11,814.69 after temporarily losing 2.5 percent in early business.
Microsoft and Texas Instruments had already given an account of their business development in the past quarter on Tuesday evening after the US stock market closed. The Microsoft share then slipped to last place in the Dow on Wednesday and recovered significantly by the end of trading with minus 0.6 percent. Against the background of high inflation and recession worries, the software company had posted its weakest sales growth in more than six years. Profits also fell significantly, but overall this was in line with expectations. However, the outlook for the current quarter was disappointing. In particular, the announced slowdown in growth in the recently strong cloud division Azure annoyed investors at times.
Texas Instruments shares fell 1.1 percent on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The chipmaker’s revenue and net income fell in the fourth quarter of 2022 due to lower demand. This should also continue in the current quarter, as Texas Instruments had announced.
After a weak start, Boeing shares turned positive and rose by 0.3 percent. Expensive problems with several types of aircraft broke the aviation and armaments group in 2022 for the fourth year of losses in a row. The minus this time was even higher than in the previous year. The shares of the hygiene article manufacturer Kimberly-Clark went down by 1.9 percent after the presentation of quarterly figures and a “disappointing outlook” according to the analysis house Bernstein. Tesla stocks edged up ahead of the after-hours earnings release, while IBM stocks slipped slightly. The computer veteran also presents after-hours figures.
With an increase of 6.6 percent, the papers of the telecom company AT&T stood out positively. AT&T convinced with an increase in sales and adjusted operating profit forecast for 2023. However, the fact that adjusted earnings per share (EPS) are likely to fall due to high pension costs and higher interest rates did not grieve investors, nor did the weak forecast for the free inflow of funds or the loss of billions together with the stagnation in sales last year.
The fact that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch does not want to merge his entertainment group Fox with his publishing company News Corp again after all caused significant price gains for both stocks. A combination is currently “not optimal” for shareholders, Fox announced on Tuesday. News Corp was up 5.7 percent on the Nasdaq and Fox was up 2.5 percent.
The euro was trading at $1.0916 at the close on Wall Street. The European Central Bank set the reference rate at 1.0878 (Tuesday: 1.0858) dollars. The dollar thus cost 0.9193 (0.9210) euros. On the US bond market, the futures contract for ten-year bonds (T-Note Future) rose by 0.18 percent to 115.23 points. The 10-year government bond yield fell to 3.44 percent./ck/nas
— By Claudia Müller, dpa-AFX —
