NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – Investors on the US stock exchanges became bolder again on Thursday and increasingly resorted to stocks. The record highs reached at the end of January were slowly but steadily approaching. In the later course of trading, the broad market Nasdaq Composite was the first of the four major US indices to reach a record high
Quarterly balance sheets – mainly from the technology sector – were largely positive. In addition, the number of initial jobless claims fell further in the last week of January, while analysts had expected an increase.
After all, the Dow Jones Industrial is testing the 31,000 point mark again. Around two hours before the close of trading, the most important Wall Street index rose 0.83 percent to 30,978.71 points. For the market-wide S&P 500 it rose by 0.84 percent to 3862.27 points. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Selection Index 100 gained 0.81 percent to 13,511.711 points and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.91 percent to a record high of 13,733.78 points.
In the Dow, the shares of Merck & Co attracted attention as one of the few losers with minus 1.5 percent. In the final quarter of 2020, the pharmaceutical company slipped deeply into the red due to high expenses for a drug recall and the takeover of cancer researcher VelosBio. Earnings per share (EPS) adjusted for one-off effects of 6.48 to 6.68 dollars are forecast for 2021, compared with 5.94 a year earlier. It was also announced that Chief Financial Officer Robert Davis would become the new CEO in the course of the year. Kenneth Frazier will leave office on June 30th.
The competitor Bristol-Meyers Squibb also announced red figures for the past quarter, but is still optimistic about the current year. Shares in the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.
On the Nasdaq, however, Ebay and the former subsidiary of the online trading platform, Paypal, made investors happy. The Internet shopping boom in the Corona crisis helped create brilliant businesses, from which the online payment service also benefited. Both the shares of Ebay and Paypal gained 6.9 percent.
Qualcomm also lost 8.7 percent. The super-fast 5G radio data transmission caused the chip company to grow by leaps and bounds in the first quarter of the business year, and the forecast for the year as a whole was above market expectations, but delivery bottlenecks are a burden./ck/he
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