NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – The US stock exchanges were largely directionless on Friday. They fluctuated between modest gains and losses and then exited the trade on a positive note. Robust data from the labor market for the month of March supported. At the same time, the surprising deterioration in the mood in industry weighed on investors’ mood.
After a very weak first quarter for the Dow Jones Industrial, the leading US index rose by 0.40 percent to 34,818.27 points at the start of April. The Wall Street Index weakened slightly over the course of the week.
The S&P 500 was up 0.34 percent on Friday at 4545.86 points. The Nasdaq 100 rose 0.15 percent to 14,861.21 points.
A look at the US labor market also pointed to a recovery course for March: Unemployment continued to fall and is rapidly approaching the level it was before the corona pandemic. Employment continued to rise, albeit at a slightly slower pace than analysts had expected. Helaba’s experts spoke of a “robust constitution”. The US Federal Reserve (Fed) is likely to worry about the further increase in wages, as it could fuel the already very high inflation.
The ISM purchasing managers’ index for US manufacturing fell to 57.1 in March compared to February, while analysts had averaged expectations for a rise. However, a value above 50 still signals growing corporate activity. Rather, some stockbrokers were concerned that there had been a sharp decline in the assessment of incoming orders.
On the company side, the shares of the telecom company Verizon were at the top of the index in the Dow towards the close of trading with a plus of 2.3 percent. The papers of the chip manufacturer Intel brought up the rear with minus 2.9 percent. However, there was no news.
Apple continued to weaken at minus 0.2 percent after its recent 11-day rally. This brought the iPhone maker’s shares back close to their record high from early January. Now it went down again for the third day in a row. It may have been a burden that JPMorgan expert Samik Chatterjee also removed Apple from the “Analyst Focus List” in addition to Qualcomm, which fell by 3.8 percent.
For this he took on the papers of the communications network equipment suppliers Ciena and Arista. According to a recent study, he considers these two to be particularly resilient in a more difficult economic environment with regard to the expenses of telecom customers for their networks as well as cloud companies and their infrastructure development. Ciena was up 0.7 percent and Arista was up 0.4 percent.
Outside of the major indices, Gamestop’s shares shot up 14 percent at the start of trading, but then ended the day 1.0 percent weaker. The retail chain for computer games is planning a stock split to make the currently $165 share more tradable and thus more interesting for small investors. However, the share is very susceptible to fluctuations, as a look at Friday and the year to date shows. After almost halving by mid-March, the paper climbed back up by a third over the course of this trading week alone.
The euro closed at $1.1049 on Wall Street after rallying as high as $1.1075 in early Frankfurt trading. The European Central Bank set the reference rate at 1.1052 (Thursday: 1.1101) dollars. The dollar thus cost 0.9048 (0.9008) euros.
On the US bond market, the futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note Future) fell by 0.55 percent to 122.20 points. The yield on ten-year government bonds rose to 2.39 percent./ck/he
By Claudia Müller, dpa-AFX
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