- Wall Street indexes closed yesterday’s session in a good mood, with Nvidia managing to resist profit taking and managing to gain more than 1%, returning to the $900 area, per share, although Super Micro Computers shares cheapened by almost 10%.
- The Dow Jones rose almost 0.9% yesterday, the Nasdaq100 gained 0.2%, and the S&P 500 rose more than 0.5% – but on slightly lower volume than last month’s average. In addition to Nvidia, the stocks of the other two largest companies – Microsoft and Apple – gained
- The People’s Bank of China kept one-year and five-year interest rates unchanged at 3.45% and 3.95%, respectively. The Hang Seng index gained nearly 0.4%. Chinese giant Tencent Holdings will report results today
- Japan’s Nikkei and Topix benchmarks, supported by a weaker yen, gained more than 0.6% and 1%, respectively, and overall sentiment in the Asian session was mostly good
- Korea’s KOSPI rose more than 1.2% driven by a 5% rise in Samsung’s share price, which was supported by reports that Nvidia was trying to buy the company’s high-bandwidth memory chip making unit
- Australia’s ASX closed the session slightly below the bar, as concerns over the PBoC’s lack of resolve to stimulate the economy put pressure on commodities
- Index contracts from the U.S. and Europe are trading slightly down. Fashion giant Kering reported an expected further slowdown and expects 20% lower y/y sales for Gucci, pressured by weak demand from the Asia-Pacific market
- The U.S. Dollar Index (USDIDX) is gaining 0.07% today, continuing its days-long trend. Investors are preparing for today’s Fed decision and Jerome Powell’s conference;
- EURUSD is trading flat around 1.0868, with two recent higher-than-expected CPI inflation readings from the US causing markets to start pricing in the risk of a more hawkish stance from the Fed chairman
- Bitcoin fell to $61,000 and is currently consolidating around $62,000 after negating yesterday’s rebound to $65,000. The vast majority of smaller cryptocurrencies are seeing further sell-offs.
- U.S. crypto exchanges Kraken and Coinbase reported technical problems with exchanges and customer withdrawals
- Sales of Grayscale (GBTC) shares reached $1 billion in the past 2 days, and yesterday ended with a net outflow of $326 million from ETFs, although the balance was still positive for all 9 funds except GBTC
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang indicated that AI ‘hallucinations’ (wrong output of data) are solvable, although humanity is about 5 years away from more perfect AI
- Energy Pathways strategists indicate that Fed cuts could bring risky price increases in the commodities market
- A New York Times report indicated that Saudi Arabia has earmarked $40 billion for AI technology development in a new initiative. Starlink’s CFO conveyed that the company will not conduct an IPO in 2024
- Analysts at Standard Chartered Wealth Management indicated that at the moment, Chinese businesses are likely to form the ‘bottom’ of profit momentum, but the economy needs more government support
