Aug 29 (The Street Press) – On Tuesday, in the early hours of trading, the main stock market indices on Wall Street went up. This happened because there were fewer job openings in the latest month, which made people think that the U.S. Federal Reserve might stop increasing interest rates for a while.
The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) gave us some information. It said that in July, there were around 8.827 million job openings. This number went down for the third month in a row, which suggests that the job market is becoming a bit less stressful. People who study the economy and were asked by Reuters thought that there would be about 9.465 million job openings, but it turned out to be less.
Investors also looked at a different report from the Conference Board. This report said that in August, people’s confidence in spending money (which is called consumer confidence) went down to 106.1 in the United States. This was not what they were expecting, as they thought it would be around 116.
“In both the JOLTS and the consumer confidence number, you’re seeing exactly what you’d want to see, a gradual decrease,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B Riley Wealth told Reuters.
“All of those things paint a picture for the potential of a soft landing” he added.
This week, we’re going to get various economic information, like the personal consumption expenditures price index and non-farm payrolls.
Last week, when the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, talked at the Jackson Hole meeting, he didn’t give any surprising signals that could make people worry about higher interest rates. This made stocks feel a bit safer on Monday. But now, everyone’s paying attention to the economic data to figure out how much longer the central bank might keep interest rates up.
The interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note went down to 4.14%, which helped many companies focused on growth. Amazon, Tesla, and Nvidia saw their stocks go up by percentages ranging from 0.8% to 2.6%.
Alphabet, the company that owns Google, went up by 2.2% because it showed off a bunch of new artificial intelligence technology and partnerships.
Catalent, a company that makes drugs for others, went up by 7% after they made an agreement with a big investor, Elliott Investment Management, to review their operations. This made the part of the stock market that includes health-related companies go up by 0.3%.
As of 10:19 a.m. Eastern Time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was higher by 133.71 points or 0.39%, standing at 34,693.69. The S&P 500 had gained 29.35 points or 0.66%, reaching 4,462.66. The Nasdaq Composite showed an increase of 133.76 points or 0.98%, reaching 13,838.89.
Salesforce, a company that makes business software, saw its stock go down by 1% after J.P. Morgan removed it from their list of companies they are closely watching.
Verizon and AT&T, which are telecom companies, went up by around 3% each after Citi, a big bank, upgraded them from “neutral” to “buy”.
Shares of PDD Holdings, a company listed in the U.S. under the ticker symbol PDD.O, went up by 18.6% because the e-commerce company did better than expected in terms of revenue for the second quarter.
On the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), there were more stocks going up than going down, with a ratio of 2.65-to-1, and on the Nasdaq, the ratio was 2.03-to-1.
In terms of stock performance, the S&P index had nine new highest points in a year and two new lowest points. On the Nasdaq, there were 28 new highest points and 61 new lowest points.
