NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – Before the long Easter weekend, the high-growth technology stocks on the US stock exchanges came under pressure. The NASDAQ 100 selection index lost 2.28 percent on Thursday to 13,893.22 points. Traders justified the losses primarily with the sharp rise in interest rates on the US bond market. Even surprisingly good economic data on consumer sentiment in the USA could not boost prices
Meanwhile, the leading index Dow was still comparatively brave with a minus of 0.33 percent to 34,451.23 points. On a weekly basis, the Dow lost 0.8 percent. There will be no trading on the US stock exchanges on Friday. The market-wide S&P 500 lost 1.21 percent on Thursday to 4392.59 points.
For years, central banks like the US Federal Reserve have circulated a lot of cheap money and pushed interest rates to record lows. Bonds barely yielded any returns. In search of income, investors invested the money not least in high-growth tech stocks. But now the era of cheap money is over, and the Fed is likely to raise interest rates sharply this year. As a result, investors are now saying goodbye to tech stocks like Apple, NVIDIA, and Salesforce.
The focus was also on the banking sector in view of a number of quarterly figures from large investment houses. The figures from Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were good, the share price rose by 1.6 and 0.8 percent respectively. Analysts praised above all the good results of the money houses in securities trading. Unlike Wells Fargo (Wells FargoCo), whose share price dropped by 4.5 percent. Experts complained about high expenses here. Goldman Sachs figures hardly moved the course.
Nike shares led the Dow with a gain of almost five percent. Analyst Matthew Boss from JPMorgan (JPMorgan ChaseCo) said after a conversation with the management of the sporting goods manufacturer that business in the important sales market China is on the right track. A positive study by Deutsche Bank on Caterpillar drove the price of the construction machinery manufacturer up by more than four percent.
A takeover bid by Tesla boss Elon Musk for Twitter did not trigger any euphoria. Musk is offering $54.20 in cash for each Twitter share. That’s 54 percent more than the shares cost on Jan. 28 — the day before Musk began investing in Twitter. Twitter shares still fell 1.7 percent to just over $45, well below the price offered by Musk. Analysts also suspected that many Twitter shareholders would probably not accept the offer. Musk himself subsequently commented in this direction.
The euro slipped, weighed down by the ECB meeting, to close at $1.0826 on Wall Street. The European Central Bank had previously set the reference rate at 1.0878 (Wednesday: 1.0826) dollars. The dollar had thus cost 0.9193 (0.9237) euros.
On the US bond market, government bonds came under pressure again after two days of recovery. The futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note Future) lost 0.80 percent to 119.83 points. In return, the yield on ten-year government bonds rose to 2.83 percent./bek/he
— By Benjamin Krieger, dpa-AFX —
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