NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – On the day options on indices and individual stocks expire, there isn’t much to be gained for investors on Wall Street. Sentiment was weighed down by comments from St. Louis Fed President James Bullard. He said he was inclined to hike US interest rates as early as 2022. That would be much earlier than the two hikes promised by the US Federal Reserve on Wednesday towards the end of 2023.
Der Dow Jones Industrial last listed on Friday 1.24 percent lower at 33,402.86 points. The US leading index is heading for the fifth weak trading day in a row and a weekly loss of more than 3 percent.
The S&P 500, which represents the broad market 
lost 0.93 percent to 4182.54 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 fell 0.52 percent to 14,090.13 points. The day before he had set another record with just over 14,200 points. This indicates a weekly balance of plus 0.7 percent for the Nasdaq 100.
On an expiry day, prices can fluctuate noticeably without significant company or economic news. The reason for this is that larger fund or asset managers in particular try to move the prices in the direction they want when the contracts expire.
From an industry perspective, financial stocks were particularly under pressure. The papers of the insurer AIG and the investment bank Morgan Stanley fell by 3.3 percent each. The stocks of the major bank JPMorgan lost 2.6 percent. Semiconductor stocks also fell sharply. The shares of Intel were seen as the Dow bottom with minus 3.2 percent.
On the corporate side, the shares of Adobe Systems came up with a price gain of 1.9 percent and another record high. The software company’s figures for the second quarter clearly exceeded expectations. According to DZ expert Ingo Wermann, they were “convincing across the board”. Adobe is profiting from the relocation of advertising budgets to the Internet and from increasing investments, emphasized the expert.
The depository receipts traded in the US for the Tübingen vaccine manufacturer Curevac recovered slightly from their almost 40 percent drop in prices on Thursday, up 8 percent. Curevac had to admit on Wednesday that its vaccine, traded as a beacon of hope, had only achieved a preliminary effectiveness of 47 percent against corona disease “of any severity”.
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