Shares on Wall Street rose for a third straight session on Wed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 69.86 pts or 0.23% to close at 31,037.68. The broader S&P 500 index rose 0.36%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.35%. The small-cap Russell 2000 dropped 0.79%.
Megacap tech stocks rose, including Apple (AAPL US, +0.96%), Microsoft (MSFT US, +1.28%), Amazon (AMZN US, +0.73%), Alphabet (GOOGL US, +1.16%), NVidia (NVDA US, +1.11%) and Meta Platforms (META US, +0.94%).
Minutes from Federal Reserve’s Jun meeting were released on Wed. They showed officials committed to bringing inflation back down to 2%, and expecting to hike another 50 or 75 basis points (bps) at the meeting on Jul 26 and 27.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note notched up 12.26 bps to 2.9280%, while the yield on the 2-year Treasuries rose 18.34 bps to 3.0018%. The 2-year/10- year yield curve became more inverted, a key recession warning.
The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed down $2.08 at US$100.69/bbl and 97 cents at US$98.53/bbl respectively.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.53% to 107.096. The euro fell to a fresh 20-year low against the US dollar. It is presently trading at US$1.0185.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Aug) contracts settled down $27.40, or 1.6%, at US$1,736.50/oz. July silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, rose 3.8 cents, or 0.2%, to end at US$19.159/oz.
European equity markets finished higher on Wed. The UK FTSE gained 1.17%, France's CAC 40 rose 2.03%, while the German DAX advanced 1.56%.
Just Eat Takeaway (JET LN, +15%) surged after Amazon agreed to take a stake in US subsidiary GrubHub. DoorDash (DASH US, -7.4%) and Uber (UBER US, - 4.5%), which offers food delivery service through Uber Eats, fell.