While you were sleeping: Wall St climbs, Treasuries drop

Friday 13th April 2018

Wall Street advanced, while US Treasuries dropped, as concerns about a global trade war and Middle East conflict eased.

US President Donald Trump is exploring rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact negotiations, senators said, while he also signalled the US and China might solve their trade dispute without additional tariffs.

“Now we’re really negotiating and I think they’re going to treat us really fairly,” Trump said during a White House meeting with Republican governors and lawmakers from farm states, Bloomberg reported. “I think they want to.”

Concern about an escalation of tension in the Middle East between the US and Russia also eased.

“Never said when an attack on Syria would take place,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “Could be very soon or not so soon at all!”

In 2.10pm trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1.3 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.9 percent. In 1.55pm trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index added 0.8 percent.

US Treasuries dropped, lifting yields on the 10-year note five basis points to 2.83 percent.

“In the past few days, some of the worries that market was fretting about—trade wars, Facebook, missile attacks—all of those have things have been walked back a little bit,” Michael Antonelli, managing director, institutional sales trading at Robert W Baird in Milwaukee, told Reuters.

Instead, investors eyed the start of a fresh round of US corporate earnings with optimism.

Analysts expect quarterly profit for S&P 500 companies to rise 18.5 percent from a year ago, the biggest gain in seven years, according to Reuters.

Shares of BlackRock climbed, up 2 percent as of 2.19pm in New York, after it reported quarterly profit that exceeded analysts’ estimates.

The Dow moved higher, as gains in shares of Intel and those of DowDuPont, recently up 3.1 percent and 2.8 percent respectively, outweighed declines in shares of Walt Disney and those of Procter & Gamble, recently down 0.8 percent and 0.4 percent respectively.

Shares of GoPro rallied, up 4.5 percent at US$5.09 as of 2.04pm in New York, after The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that China’s Xiaomi has weighed whether to make an offer for the company but doesn’t want to overpay.

GoPro could fetch US$1 billion, based on the price that Hewlett Packard paid for Palm, another struggling electronics maker, in 2010, according to The Information.

Earlier in the day, GoPro shares climbed as high as US$5.30.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index ended the day with a 0.7 percent increase from the previous close. The UK’s FTSE 100 Index eked out a 0.02 percent gain, France’s CAC40 Index rose 0.6 percent, while Germany’s DAX Index rose 1 percent.

(BusinessDesk)

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