Leading indices end July in positive territory
Earnings season fuels optimism on Wall Street
7/31/2023 11:04 p.m
The optimists on the US stock market can feel encouraged by the course of the reporting season so far. At the same time, hopes of an end to interest rate hikes are growing. At the end of the month, the US stock exchanges recorded a significant plus.
The US stock exchanges rose slightly on Monday. The recent strong run of the most important indices thus proved to be stable. Hopes of an end to the US Federal Reserve’s rate hikes had increasingly boosted the stock exchanges over the course of the month, with the bottom line being that profits were posted in July.
The reporting season, which has so far been better than expected, also provided positive impetus. Almost 80 percent of the companies from the broad S&P 500 index that have already presented their figures have so far exceeded expectations with their quarterly figures, explained capital market strategist Jürgen Molnar from Robomarkets. About half of the companies have already presented their numbers.
The most well-known Wall Street index, the Dow Jones Industrial, made a small jump at the close, ending the day 0.28 percent higher at 35,559.53 points. This means an increase of 3.4 percent for the month of July. The market-wide S&P 500 rose by 0.15 percent to 4588.96 points at the start of the week and posted a monthly increase of around three percent. The technology-heavy selection index Nasdaq 100 rose by 0.04 percent to 15,757.00 points. For him, the monthly gain is 3.8 percent.
“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” inspire cinema shares
In the case of individual values, meanwhile, a new setback in the scandal about allegedly asbestos-contaminated baby powder slowed Johnson & Johnson (J&J) down. The shares of the US consumer goods group fell by around four percent. A US judge had rejected J&J’s second attempt to bankrupt a subsidiary that had been set up to contain billions of dollars in risks associated with the controversial talc product.
The run on the cinema films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” meanwhile inspired the US cinema chain AMC. Titles jumped more than 7 percent after opening screenings of the two films gave the US company its best week in box office in the company’s 103-year history.
After the figures from several heavyweights, US investors were waiting for the quarterly reports from the smartphone giant Apple, the online retailer Amazon and the semiconductor company AMD, which were due in the course of the week. Positive quarterly results from technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta and the chip manufacturers Intel and Lam Research had recently driven prices. Investors are also keeping an eye on the upcoming survey results for manufacturing and the service sector as well as the wages and salaries report for July.