Wall Street powered higher on Friday supported by strong earnings reports still rolling in and an easing of fears about the Fed hiking rates at its next meeting.<\/p>\n
The key S&P 500 index gained 0.6% to a new record high.<\/p>\n
The blue-chip Dow rose 0.3% and the tech-centric Nasdaq bettered both, up 1.3%.<\/p>\n
When trading closed on Saturday morning (AEST), ASX 200 futures were pointing to a 0.4% gain today.<\/p>\n
Over the week, the S&P 500 rallied 3.6% and the Nasdaq 5.2%.<\/p>\n
With earnings season entering the final stretch, of the 436 companies in the S&P 500 that have already reported results, 85% have topped analyst expectations, according to LSEG data \u2014 well above the 68% average since 1994.<\/p>\n
US listed, Australian-based collaboration software maker Atlassian shot up more than 35% for its largest-ever daily percentage gain, while chip company Microchip jumped almost 14%, its best daily performance in more than 15 months, after both forecast quarterly revenue above estimates.<\/p>\n
Elon Musk’s SpaceX surged 15.8% a day after the expiry of the first of several share lockup restrictions following its record public offering in June.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly weak July jobs figures and downward revisions of earlier releases cooled expectations about the Fed hiking rates at its September meeting.<\/p>\n
The Labor Department said nonfarm payrolls decreased by 23,000 jobs last month, well below the estimate of economists polled by Reuters that called for an increase of 80,000 jobs.<\/p>\n
Previously reported job gains for the prior two months were also revised sharply lower, down about 100,000, while the unemployment rate fell to 4.1% last month from 4.2% in June due to workers leaving the labour force.<\/p>\n
The weaker jobs market combined with lower oil prices easing inflation concerns saw market expectations for a September rate hike from the Fed drop to about 44%, according to CME FedWatch, down from 55% in the prior session and 67% a week ago.<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, US Treasury bond yields fell. The US dollar fell against all major currencies, including the Aussie dollar, which hit its highest level since early June.<\/p>\n
Gold hit a seven-week high, up 2.3% on Friday to $US4,336\/ounce. The spot price jumped 7% last week, its biggest weekly gain since January.<\/p>\n
Ongoing uncertainty about an end to the US-Iran war saw oil prices on the rise again.<\/p>\n
The global benchmark, Brent crude futures gained about $US1\/barrel, or 1.3%, to $US83.55\/barrel.<\/p>\n
However, over the week Brent was 8% lower.<\/p>\n
With Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wall Street powered higher on Friday supported by strong earnings reports still rolling in and an easing of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2001,64,63,166,2009,99,2005,160,2010,2006,2002,1491],"class_list":["post-849633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-asx","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-dollar","tag-bitcoin","tag-business","tag-dow-jones","tag-live-blog","tag-live-update","tag-nyse","tag-share-market","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}