It looked like it was going to be a very bad day on Wall Street on Thur. Big bank earnings kicked off with disappointing results. However, the selling tempered after a couple of Federal Reserve officials said that the Fed’s next rate hike may be less than the 100 basis points (bps) that many investors fear. When Thur’s trading session ended, the losses were moderate. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was able to finish in the black.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 142.62 pts or 0.46% to close at 30,630.17. The broader S&P 500 index fell 0.30%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.03%. At one point, the Dow plummeted as much as 628 points while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 fell more than 2% each.
Apple (AAPL US, +2.05%), Microsoft (MSFT US, +0.54%), Amazon (AMZN US, +0.21%) and NVidia (NVDA US, +1.37%) rose. However, Alphabet (GOOGL US, -0.89%), and Meta Platforms (META US, -3.33%) shares fell on Thur.
Bank stocks slid in the US as JPMorgan (JPM US, -3.49%) and Morgan Stanley (MS US, -0.39%) missed estimates. JP Morgan added to reserves for bad loans and halted its share buybacks. Both banks saw greatly reduced investment banking fees.
The yield on the 2-year Treasuries fell 2.26 bps to 3.1321%, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury note notched up 2.59 bps to 2.9595%.
The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed down 47 cents at US$99.10/bbl and 52 cents at US$95.78/bbl respectively on Thur.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.54% to 108.544 on Thur.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Aug) contracts settled down $29.70, or 1.7%, at US$1,705.80/oz. September silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, fell 96.9 cents, or 5.0%, to end at US$18.225/oz.
Copper and other base metal prices slid sharply, dragging the UK FTSE 100 back towards last week’s lows, led by the likes of Anglo American (AAL LN, - 5.12%), Rio Tinto (RIO LN, -4.7%) and Glencore (GLEN LN, -4.1%).
The UK FTSE lost 1.63%. France's CAC 40 fell 1.41%, while the German DAX retreated 1.86%