US equities sank on Thur, completely erasing their gains from the prior session. On Wed, traders plowed into stocks after Fed Chair Jay Powell said he saw no need for 75 basis points (bps) rate hikes. On Thur, after a night’s sleep, the same traders seemed to decide that a series of 50 bps hikes will be just as bad.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1063.09 pts, or 3.12%, to close at 32,997.97. The broader S&P 500 index fell 3.57%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite retreated 4.99%. The small-cap Russell 2000 dropped 4.04%.
Mega cap tech stocks plunged on Thur, including Apple (AAPL US, -5.57%), Microsoft (MSFT US, -4.36%) Amazon (AMZN US, -7.56%), Alphabet (GOOGL US, -4.71%), Nvidia (NVDA US, -7.33%), and Meta Platforms (FB US, -6.77%).
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note notched up 10.22 basis points (bps) to 3.0365%, while the yield on the 2-year Treasury rose 6.13 bps to 2.7034%.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 1.14% to 103.752.
OPEC+ stuck to its policy of raising output by 432,000 barrels a day for Jun, as expected, ignoring calls to boost supply. The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed up 76 cents at US$110.90/bbl and 45 cents at US$108.26/bbl respectively.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Jun) contracts settled up $6.90, or 0.4%, at US$1,875.70/oz. July silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, rose 4.1 cents, or 0.2%, to end at US$22.443/oz.
European equity markets finished mixed on Thur. The UK FTSE gained 0.13%, France's CAC 40 fell 0.43%, while the German DAX advanced 0.49%