Börse Express – ROUNDUP/Aktien New York Conclusion: Weak start to central bank week

NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – The recently friendly US stock markets got off to a weak start on Monday in an eventful week. Fear of the interest rate decisions in New York, Frankfurt and London and the figures from several US tech giants increasingly dominated the Nasdaq stock exchange in particular: the Nasdaq 100 selection index
extended initial losses and closed 2.09 percent lower at 11,912.39 points. But investors also withdrew from the New York Stock Exchange (Nyse), which is characterized by more traditional sectors: while the leading index Dow Jones Industrial ultimately fell by 0.77 percent to 33,717.09 points, the market-wide S&P 500 fell by 1.30 percent to 4017.77 points.

After the strong start to the year on the stock exchanges, temporary setbacks are likely, according to HQ Trust. Michael Heise, the asset manager’s chief economist, justified this with the still high inflation and the uncertainty about the course of monetary policy in the fight against inflation. “The markets underestimate that the central banks have not yet received the all-clear signal,” said the expert.

The US Federal Reserve is expected to slow down again on Wednesday. According to corresponding signals from central bank president Jerome Powell, among others, economists are assuming an increase of 0.25 percentage points this time – after four interest rate steps of 0.75 points each, the monetary watchdogs already had their foot off the gas a bit in December with an increase of 0.5 points taken.

Meanwhile, we are eagerly awaiting any indication of how the Fed will continue in the course of the year. Some observers do not rule out that the rate hike expected on Wednesday could be the last for the time being. In addition, there is already speculation on the markets that the central bank could lower its interest rate again in the second half of the year. The interest rate decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England will follow on Thursday.

The technology sector, which is particularly sensitive to interest rates, has already generously priced in hopes of a less strict US monetary policy, as evidenced by the significantly better performance of the Nasdaq compared to the Nyse indices since the beginning of the year. The Dow and S&P 500 are up 1.7 and 4.6 percent respectively, while the Nasdaq 100 is still up almost 9 percent, although it also lost much more than the standard indices in 2022.

The losses of the tech greats Apple Alphabet
Amazon and meta in the Nasdaq 100, which will report numbers starting Wednesday, were between one and a half and three percent on Monday. Pierre Veyret from broker ActivTrades justified this with profit-taking. A course correction in tech stocks had also taken place in Asia and Europe.

The shareholders of the electric car manufacturer Tesla After a two-day rally, they were only able to enjoy further gains for a short time – in the end, the shares fell by 6.3 percent, despite a buy recommendation from the private bank Berenberg. Since the beginning of the year, however, there has still been a price recovery of 35 percent.

The shares of the smaller competitor Lucid had been more than twice as strong in the past few weeks who is the best in class on the Nasdaq 100 for the year to date. On Friday alone, thanks to vague takeover speculation, they had at times almost doubled their value compared to the previous day. Now investors probably got cold feet and pocketed the profits, so that at the end of the index it went down by 8.7 percent.

At Johnson & Johnson a price drop of 3.7 percent meant the last place in the Dow and the lowest share price since mid-October. The pharmaceutical and consumer goods group was hit in connection with court cases surrounding a baby powder suspected of being cancerous. A federal appeals court ruled that Johnson & Johnson cannot use creditor protection for a company founded specifically for this purpose in order to fend off more than 40,000 legal proceedings. Johnson & Johnson should therefore have to defend itself against the lawsuits again in the future.

Meanwhile, the medical technology group GE Healthcare, which has been listed on the stock exchange since the beginning of the year, was pleased its shareholders with a price increase of two percent. The spin-off of the conglomerate General Electric (GE) ended the past year with a decline in profits. But it held up better than its Dutch competitor Philips
which had announced a loss of billions for 2022, and was also able to increase sales.

The titles of the Tübingen vaccine researcher Curevac listed in New York increased by 1.7 percent. They are thus continuing to stabilize after their fluctuations, which had recently triggered encouraging study data on new Covid and flu vaccines. Curevac has now provided similar data that relate to older adults for both indications.

The euro was unable to maintain its temporary gains against the US dollar and was last seen in New York trading at $ 1.084. The ECB had set the reference rate at 1.0903 (Friday: 1.0865) dollars and the dollar thus cost 0.9171 (0.9204) euros. US government bonds also recorded losses at the beginning of the week: the futures contract for ten-year bonds (T-Note Future) fell by 0.25 percent to 114.33 points. In return, the yield on ten-year government bonds climbed to 3.55 percent./gl/jha/

— By Gerold Löhle, dpa-AFX —

 ISIN  US2605661048  US6311011026  US78378X1072

AXC0289 2023-01-30/22:27

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