NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – Investors on the US stock exchanges have become a little bolder on Thursday and have increasingly resorted to stocks. The record highs reached at the end of January are moving in small steps, but steadily closer. 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.
The Dow Jones Industrial rose 0.78 percent to 30,963.60 points in early trading. For the market-wide S&P 500 it rose by 0.53 percent to 3850.41 points. The technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 gained 0.18 percent to 13 13 426.10 points.
In the Dow, the shares of Merck & Co with minus 1.7 percent drew attention to the bottom. In the final quarter of 2020, the group slipped deep 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. The shares in the S&P 500 fell 0.2 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. While the shares of Ebay rose 5.9 percent, those of PayPal rose 6.4 percent.
Qualcomm also lost 9.4 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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