NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – A week of strong price fluctuations on Wall Street should end with losses on Friday. The broker IG den estimated the Dow around an hour before the starting bell 0.8 percent lower to 30,350 points. On a weekly basis, there would be a loss of around two percent.
“It had already indicated that the enthusiasm on the stock exchanges would subside,” wrote analyst Craig Erlam of the trading house Oanda. At the end of last year, investors had priced in everything positive, now investors are unsettled in the face of ever new lockdowns around the globe. However, Erlam believes this is only a short-term phenomenon in a fundamentally solid equity environment.
The ongoing struggle between private and small speculators organized on the Internet, on the one hand, and professional hedge funds, on the other, contributing to general uncertainty. “The coming weeks could be a wild ride,” said Erlam.
This is supported by the ongoing capricious prices of the papers of the video game retailer Gamestop and the cinema chain AMC Entertainment, which have become gambling papers. The former shot up again by 77 percent before the trading day, after having slumped by more than 40 percent the day before. The latter jumped 42 percent, on Thursday AMC had slumped by almost 60 percent.
In view of such jumps in the price of small caps, the pre-listing movements of large corporations in terms of quarterly figures looked tranquil: Caterpillar, for example, stepped on the spot. The construction machinery manufacturer was cautiously optimistic about the current first quarter. Honeywell shares lost 2 percent, disappointing the profit forecast of the industrial service provider for the first quarter. The course of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly gained 4.5 percent after quarterly figures.
The shares of Novavax were in high demand in the pre-market period, they jumped 55 percent and for the first time in more than five years over 200 US dollars. A vaccine candidate from the company has shown around 90 percent effectiveness against Covid-19, according to preliminary results. A corona vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is less effective – the share price lost almost 4 percent./bek/fba
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