After a drama-packed week of central bank meetings, economic indicators and corporate earnings, Wall Street just may find some relief in the dog days of summer.
The US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) dashed hopes for policy action and the US jobs report for last month stirred the bulls with employment gains well above expectations.
Calendars will be noticeably lighter next week as vacation season hits high gear, offering perhaps a respite to investors wanting to coolly scrutinize their options.
The main Wall Street indices slid for four days before the US Department of Labor’s report on Friday kicked off a powerful rally.
Over the course of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained a meager 0.16 percent, finishing at 13,096.17 points, the blue-chip index’s highest close since May 3.
The technology-rich NASDAQ rose 0.33 percent to 2,967.90 points.
The Standard & Poor’s 500, a broad measure of the markets, advanced 0.36 percent to 1,390.99 points.
Wall Street spent the early part of the week waiting for back-to-back policy decisions from the Fed on Wednesday, and from the ECB on Thursday.
In the end, both the Fed and ECB dashed hopes for fresh action to jumpstart weak economies and in the case of the ECB, to take immediate action addressing the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Stocks slumped.
Then Friday’s highly anticipated jobs report came in, showing the US added 163,000 jobs last month, well above the 100,000 expected, while the unemployment rate rose a tenth of a point to 8.3 percent. Stocks jumped.
IHS Global Insight analysts Paul Edelstein and Nigel Gault said the favorable jobs outlook was unlikely to change the Fed’s outlook, which they saw as heading toward a third round of bond-buying to help boost the sluggish economy.
“The report will alleviate fears that the US might be tipping back into recession, but we do not believe that it was strong enough to dissuade the Fed from introducing a new quantitative easing program at its next meeting” on Sept. 12 to Sept. 13, they said.
Earnings season enters the final lap next week. Briefing.com analysts said just over 80 percent of the S&P 500 companies had reported quarterly results, with about two-thirds of them having beaten earnings estimates.
“On the other hand, roughly 56 percent of companies have missed sales expectations. Guidance has been decidedly cautious,” they said.
Among companies lined up to release reports next week are the Disney Company, on Tuesday and News Corp, on Wednesday.
The economic calendar is light on major indicators, except for Thursday’s official data on the US trade deficit in June.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS