Wall Street: Wall Street opens higher, renewed optimism is confirmed


PARIS (Reuters) – The New York Stock Exchange opened higher on Thursday on renewed optimism in equity markets fueled by strong results from companies like Macy’s, while new macroeconomic data point to only a gradual rise in interest rates in the United States.

After ten minutes of trading, the Dow Jones index gained 335.3 points, or 1.04%, to 32,455.58 points and the wider Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.93% to 4,016, 07 dots.

The Nasdaq Composite took 0.73%, or 83.82 points, to 11,518.56.

An hour before the opening of Wall Street, the Commerce Department indicated that the contraction of the American economy in the first quarter had been a little stronger than initially estimated (-1.5% at an annualized rate against -1, 4%) due to a record trade deficit and a slight slowdown in inventory build-up.

Jobless claims last week, on the other hand, fell a little more than expected to 210,000.

These new data did not call into question the renewed optimism that had begun the day before on Wall Street and even confirmed, according to Thomas Hayes, president of Great Hill Capital, the scenario of only a gradual rise in rates, the economy already being suffering.

“The data is supportive of the development of a possible accommodating bias several months from now,” he says.

According to the minutes of the Fed’s May meeting, the majority of U.S. central bank officials deemed further 50 basis point credit cost hikes in June and July “likely appropriate”, a prospect that reassures some investors, worried that a sharp rise in rates will plunge the economy into recession.

However, the impact of the war in Ukraine, health restrictions in China and the mixed results of certain companies continue to limit risk appetite.

In values, the semiconductor sector is driving the trend after, on the one hand, the announcement by Broadcom (+0.7%) of the acquisition of cloud computing service provider VMware (+0.5%) for 61 billion dollars (56.9 billion euros) and, on the other hand, the disappointing forecasts of Nvidia (-1.3%).

Intel, Qualcomm and AMD are wanted.

Apple fell 1.3% after Bloomberg reported that iPhone production levels for this year would remain broadly unchanged at around 220 million units.

Twitter gained 4.3%, Elon Musk having announced on Wednesday that he would increase his personal contribution by 6.25 billion dollars for the takeover of the social network.

The Macy’s department store chain jumped 13% on the back of an upward revision to its annual profit forecast, dragging the entire retail sector (3.07%) and consumer sector (1, 08%).

(Written by Claude Chendjou, edited by Bertrand Boucey)

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