US equities rallied in late afternoon trading on Thur and ended in the green. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 87.06 pts, or 0.25%, to close at 34,583.57. The broader S&P 500 index rose 0.43%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.06%. The small cap Russell 2000 dropped 0.35%.
Costco (COST US, +3.98%) reached a record high. Costco’s US same store sales rose 19.1% in Mar. Pfizer shares (PFE US) popped 4.33%.
HP (HPQ US, +14.75%) shares hit a record high on Thur after Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B US, +0.52%) bought a $4.2b stake.
Shares of Megacap tech were mixed as Amazon (AMZN US, -0.61%), Alphabet (GOOGL US, -0.48%) and Meta Platforms (FB US, -0.16%) fell, while Microsoft (MSFT US, +0.62%) and Apple (AAPL US, +0.18%) rose.
After briefly inverting last week, US Treasury yield curve continues to steepen with 10- and 30-year yields rising to the highest level since 2019. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note notched up 6.03 basis points (bps) to 2.6578%, while the 30-year yield rose 5.3 bps to 2.6790%. The 2-year yield finished at 2.462%.
The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed down 49 cents at US$100.58/bbl and 20 cents at US$96.03/bbl respectively.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.15% to 99.751.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Jun) contracts settled up $14.70, or 0.8%, at US$1,937.80/oz. May silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, rose 27.7 cents, or 1.1%, to end at US$24.735/oz.
European equity markets finished lower on Thur. The UK FTSE lost 0.47%, France's CAC 40 fell 0.57%, while the German DAX retreated 0.52%.
The European energy sector ended in the red as Shell’s (SHELL NA, -2.13%) hit from its withdrawal from Russia weighed on oil producers. Shell's exit from Russia is set to trigger a write-down of up to $5b in the 1Q.