Wall Street indexes rose slightly on Monday
Wall Street indexes rose slightly on Monday at the start of the busy week from second-quarter corporate earnings reports. Markets also expect a cut in interest rates by the Federal Reserve next week.
The broader index S&P 500 rose by 0.28% to 2,985.03 points, while the technology Nasdaq Composite added 0.71% to 8,204.14 points. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by only 17.7 points, or 0.07%, to 27,171.90 points, as the depreciation of Boeing's shares affected the performance of the index.
The CBOE Volatility Index, which measures the implied volatility of S&P 500 options, was down 6.37% to 13.53.
Last week, US indexes recorded their biggest weekly decline since May, against the backdrop of the first financial reports and potential interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.
A statement by New York Federal Reserve Governor John Williams initially led investors to believe that the Central Bank had a better chance of cutting interest rates by 50 basis points. Speaking on Thursday, Williams said it was better for central banks to take precautions than to wait for a crash.
Trump Fed nominee Judy Shelton said she would have voted for a half-percentage point cut at next week's meeting if she were part of the Federal Open Market Committee.
According to CME's FedWatch, market expectations for interest rate cuts of 25 basis points later this month are 75.5%. At the same time, traders set a 24.5% chance of reducing interest rates by 50 basis points.
The US President Donald Trump criticized the Fed's decision to raise interest rates four times last year, saying on Monday that the central bank should take a deeper cut in its forthcoming meeting on July 30 and 31.
Corporate stocks performance
Boeing reported a decline in the value of its stock by nearly 1% after Fitch lowered the company's stock market to negative.
The technology sector has grown by 1% thanks in particular to chip makers. The shares of Applied Materials, Micron Technology, and Lam Research rose by at least 3.7%. The reason for this was Goldman Sachs' upgrading of the companies' rating.
Apple Inc and Intel Corpo were performing strong, adding 2.29% and 2.15%, respectively, while Microsoft gained 1.32%.
Boeing reported a decline in the value of its stock by nearly 1% after Fitch lowered the company's rating to negative.
Equifax Inc came to a 700 million USD settlement with federal regulators and US states related to a 2017 data breach that exposed the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans. Shares rose by 0.4% Monday.
Shares of DaVita rallied 4.9% on Monday, after the dialysis-services company raised its profit outlook for the second quarter, ahead of an expected execution of a 1.2 billion USD share repurchase program.
The top performers on the S&P 500 were Halliburton Company (+9.15%), Applied Materials Inc (+6.11%) and Western Digital Corporation (+5.43%), while on the flipside were Signet Jewelers Ltd (-4.35%), Kroger Company (-3.83%) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co (-3.64%).
Corporate earnings reports
More than a quarter of the S&P 500 companies will report their financial results this week, including Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, McDonald's and Boeing.
So far, more than 15% of the S&P 500 public companies have published their quarterly results. Of them, 78.5% have surpassed analysts' earnings expectations and 67% have reported better than expected earnings.
The strong dollar is the biggest challenge for profits, not the trade war between the US and China, but this problem will worsen in the third quarter of 2019.
Today, Washington Trust Bancorp, the parent company of The Washington Trust company, today announced second-quarter 2019 net income of 17.3 million USD, or 0.99 USD per diluted share, compared to net income of 17.5 million USD, or 1.00 USD per diluted share, reported for the first quarter of 2019.
RBB Bancorp and its subsidiaries, Royal Business Bank and RBB Asset Management Company, announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2019. The company reported net income of 10.1 million USD, or 0.50 USD diluted earnings per share, for the three months ended June 30, 2019, compared to net income of 10.4 million USD, or 0.51 USD diluted earnings per share, and 9.4 million USD, or 0.54 USD diluted earnings per share, for the three months ended March 31, 2019 and June 30, 2018, respectively.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://financeandmarkets.com/wall-street-indexes-rose-slightly-on-monday/