Home Australian News Wall Street drifts near its record levels, ASX set to edge lower

Wall Street drifts near its record levels, ASX set to edge lower

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Wall Street drifts near its record levels, ASX set to edge lower

Domino’s Pizza jumped 7 per cent after it reported profit for the last three months of 2023 that topped analysts’ expectations.

Amazon stock was mostly unchanged after it officially joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance, which fell 2.3 per cent.

Homebuilder stocks were higher, but they wobbled a bit after a report showed sales of new homes strengthened last month by less than economists expected. Toll Brothers was up 1.1 per cent, and Lennar was clinging to a 0.1 per cent gain.

Last week, stocks got a big boost after another blowout report from Nvidia added more chum to the frenzy that’s already built around artificial-intelligence technology. Nvidia, whose chips help power AI technologies, rose another 1.4 per cent Monday, and it’s already up 61 per cent so far this year.

Earnings reporting season for the big companies in the S&P 500 is in its tail end, but this week still offers updates from several big names. They include several that could give colour on how well spending by US households is holding up. Such spending has been one of the main reasons the US economy has blasted through expectations for a possible recession.

Best Buy, Lowe’s and TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, will all report this week. So will several big tech-related companies, including Salesforce.com and HP.

On the economic calendar, the US government on Thursday will give the latest update on the measure of inflation that the Federal Reserve prefers to use. It’s usually a less impactful report, because data on inflation at the consumer and wholesale levels for the month have already been released.

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But those reports came in hotter than economists expected, which could lead to more volatility this time around. The hope on Wall Street is that inflation will continue to cool fast enough to convince the Federal Reserve to begin cutting rates by June.

Bond yields were holding relatively steady, helping to keep things calm in the stock market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury ticked up to 4.29 per cent from 4.25 per cent late Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed. Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.3 per cent to set another record after recouping the last of the losses suffered in the bursting of its “bubble” economy at the end of 1989.

Stocks were lower across much of the rest of Asia and mixed in much of Europe.

AP

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