Stock Market today: Dow Gains as Inflation Data Looms
New York – The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 196.39 points, or 0.43%,today,propelled by gains in UnitedHealth shares.The positive movement comes as investors await key inflation data expected to influence the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy.
Oracle shares surged 26% in extended trading following the release of its earnings report, revealing a 1,529% increase in multicloud database revenue from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the last quarter, driven by demand for AI servers. Despite the revenue jump, the latest earnings fell short of expectations.”We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz stated. “It was an astonishing quarter – and demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to build.”
Nvidia, another company benefiting from the AI trend, saw a nearly 2% increase in its stock price.
Looking ahead, traders are focused on Wednesday’s producer price index report and thursday’s consumer price index reading. Economists predict monthly increases of 0.3% for both headline and core indexes, perhaps pushing the annual headline CPI rate to 2.9% and holding the core reading steady at 3.1%.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, believes these figures would support the Federal Reserve’s plan for another rate cut at its September meeting. ”In general, the inflation news over the next couple of days would have to be remarkably hotter than anticipated for anything to change the narrative that we’re getting a rate cut in September,” he told CNBC.
