NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – Before the speech by the US Federal Reserve chief, cautious optimism is spreading again on Wall Street. The broker IG valued the Dow Jones Industrial on Friday an hour before the start of trading 0.30 percent firmer at 35 318 points. The US leading index is heading for a weekly plus of almost 0.6 percent. IG sees the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 up 0.28 percent at 15,322 points. Both indices came under some pressure in late trading on Thursday.
Powell’s speech (around 4 p.m.) is at the center of the central bank symposium, which was held online as last year and which actually traditionally takes place in Jackson Hole (Wyoming). It is uncertain whether the US Federal Reserve chief will give any signals about the future monetary policy of the United States. The main interest is the point in time when the billion dollar bond purchases will gradually be scaled back. The extensive purchases had driven the bull market in recent years.
Corporate news contained light and shade for investors. The fashion chain Gap was able to recover somewhat from its recent price losses thanks to surprisingly good quarterly figures and increased annual targets: the shares rose by almost eight percent before the market.
The business figures of the cloud software providers Workday and Bill.com also met with a positive response in the market: Their shares jumped by almost eight and around 15 percent respectively – the latter are likely to continue their record hunt.
On the other hand, the shares of Peloton sagged by almost five percent. The fitness equipment specialist reported a halving of growth for the past quarter and also unsettled investors with an unspecified accounting problem. In the first quarter, Peloton more than doubled sales thanks to the corona boom.
The last friendly shares of Doordash lost almost two percent after it became known that the US metropolis New York is tightening the regulation of the food delivery industry. In the future, it may also charge restaurants a maximum of 15 percent of the order value of a food delivery as a fee – a previously only temporary regulation should now apply permanently. The law has yet to be signed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Both Doordash and the Just Eat Takeaway subsidiary Grubhub appealed.
The printer and computer manufacturer HP fell short of expectations because of the shortage of chips. The better than expected profit could not compensate for that: The shares lost almost five and a half percent. Industry colleague Dell could neither score with its quarterly report nor with its raised annual targets, as the pre-market price minus of around one and a half percent showed. However, the shares had already done well recently and are not far below their record levels from June./gl/jha
Source: dpa-AFX
– .
