NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – The US stock markets closed mixedly after a strong week. The ceasefire in Iran remains fragile. Ahead of the planned negotiations between the USA and Iran in Pakistan this weekend, US President Donald Trump threatened Tehran with further attacks if the planned peace talks failed.
Current US economic and inflation data had little influence on prices. No new impetus came from oil prices, which have been the most important pacesetter for global stock markets since the Iran war. They were quoted at around the previous day’s level, which means that there has been no change in inflation and economic expectations.
The Dow Jones Industrial ended with a loss of 0.56 percent at 47,916.57 points. This resulted in a weekly gain of around three percent for the US leading index. The market-wide S&P 500 fell by 0.11 percent to 6,816.89 points on Friday. The NASDAQ 100 ultimately rose by 0.14 percent to 25,116.34 points. This means the weekly increase is around four and a half percent.
Consumer sentiment in the US – measured by the University of Michigan Consumer Climate Index – deteriorated more than expected in April and fell to a record low. Meanwhile, the Iran war drove up the US inflation rate significantly in March. Year-on-year consumer prices rose 3.3 percent, compared to 2.4 percent in February. On average, however, economists had expected an even larger increase to 3.4 percent. The majority of experts now assume that the US Federal Reserve will not turn the interest rate screw for the time being and will first wait and see how things develop.
In terms of industry, the focus was once again on software stocks, which had another black day the day before. The sector has been suffering greatly from concerns about AI displacement for some time now. The situation for investors did not improve with the Middle East war. Citigroup has now removed its recommendations for some stocks, which, among others, dragged the shares of DocuSign and Autodesk down by 5.9 and 3.0 percent respectively.
A skeptical analyst study caused a loss of 3.1 percent for Nike’s shares. Piper Sandler experts downgraded it, primarily out of concern for the saturated athleisure business with fashionable sportswear.
CoreWeave shares rose almost 11 percent. The provider of cloud capacity in the field of artificial intelligence had previously announced that the AI specialist Anthropic would be leasing data center capacity. The day before, CoreWeave had announced a significantly long-term agreement with the social network operator Meta (Meta Platforms (ex Facebook)) worth around $21 billion.
Organon (OrganonCompany) rose almost 28 percent after the “Economic Times” reported that India’s Sun Pharmaceutical wanted to make a $12 billion bid to buy the heavily indebted women’s health company. Sun Pharmaceutical called the report “speculative.”/edh/he
