While you were sleeping: Oil, US earnings lift Wall Street

Friday 29th January 2016

Wall Street moved higher with oil prices and better-than-expected US corporate earnings including Facebook.

Oil prices rose amid fresh reports about efforts to lower the global glut between the world’s top producers. To be sure, OPEC poured cold water on an Interfax report that it had scheduled a meeting with Russia to discuss a coordination in output cuts.

“It’s possible that Russia could be testing the waters to gauge how OPEC members would respond to the idea of cuts," Jason Bordoff, director of the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former senior oil official at the White House, told Bloomberg.

Oil last traded above US$33 a barrel, having pared some of its earlier gains.

"Oil's been firmly in control of the market," Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, told Reuters. “I think what oil has become is a proxy for 'are we going into a recession?’”

Wall Street gained. In 12.55pm trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 0.4 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index climbed 0.9 percent. In 12.40pm trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 0.7 percent.

Rallies in shares of Caterpillar and those of Chevron Corp, last up 3.7 percent and 3 percent respectively, led the Dow higher. Bucking the trend were slides in shares of American Express and those of Merck, down 3.7 percent and 2.1 percent respectively.

Shares of Facebook soared, last up 15.9 percent, after the company posted results that surpassed expectations.

Also pleasing investors with their latest earnings were PayPal and Under Armour, last up 7.6 percent and 19.9 percent respectively.

Shares of Amazon, which is set to report after the market close, last traded 6.8 percent higher.

A day after the Federal Reserve said it expects to raise interest rates gradually, a report showed orders for all durable goods sank 5.1 percent in December, the largest drop since August 2014.

“US companies are cutting investment sharply, and the key worry is that it seems to be spreading beyond the oil sector and in the meantime consumers are missing in action, not able to offset the huge drag from the energy sector," Thomas Costerg, a US economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York, told Reuters.

A report on Friday is expected to show that fourth-quarter gross domestic product rose at a 0.8 percent annual rate, down from a 2 percent pace in the third quarter.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index finished the day with a 1.6 percent drop from the previous close, amid disappointing corporate earnings including from Roche. The UK’s FTSE 100 Index declined 1 percent, France’s CAC 40 Index fell 1.3 percent, while Germany’s DAX Index slid 2.5 percent.

“Risk appetite is still very fragile,” William Hobbs, head of investment strategy at Barclays’ wealth-management unit in London, told Bloomberg. “Right now, its a matter of guilty till proven innocent in terms of whether or not the world is on the cusp of the next economic downturn. And the latest European earnings have been mixed.”

Meanwhile, a report consumer prices in Germany dropped in January, sliding 0.9 percent from December. That’s the largest fall in a year.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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