Latest stock market news – Dow Jones leads the way and Trump’s media company soars on the market.
The 3rd week of March 2024 is proving to be great for stock traders, with many opportunities for big profits.
Dive into the excitement with the latest stock market news, showcasing thrilling gains and bullish trends.
Latest Stock Market News: Market Snapshot
The Dow Jones Industrial Average led its peers on US stock exchanges on Wednesday in a low-volume day thanks to an increase in Merck’s stock price.
The market was waiting for economic data and comments from Federal Reserve officials ahead of a holiday weekend.
Merck enjoyed a 3.7% upswing after the US Federal Drug Administration gave the green light to its treatment for a rare form of lung disease.
Latest Stock Market News: Dow Reaching All-Time Highs
The Dow is within 1% of its all-time high of 40,000 points.
The Nasdaq lost 3.1% along with Nvidia’s price.
Elsewhere, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose slightly, boosted by Marvell Technology, which spiked 4.4%.
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller’s speech to the Economic Club of New York at noon last Friday had investors on the edge of their seats.
Latest Stock Market News: Dow Reaching All-Time Highs
This was because advancements at the end of the year for US stock indices – led by a spike in the price of artificially intelligent stocks – were driven by talk of another interest rate cut by the Fed later this year.
Futures markets show a 70% chance that the Federal Reserve will start lowering interest rates in June.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index and the final report on fourth-quarter GDP, coming up this week, could change investor expectations that an interest rate cut will come early.
Latest Stock Market News: Dow Gains, Nasdaq Slips
By midday, the Dow had gained 231.38 points, or 0.59%; the S P 500 had increased 15.24 points, or 0.29%; and the Nasdaq Composite slipped.
The utilities sector and real estate led gains across the S&P 500, while the information technology sector lagged.
Latest Stock Market News: Trump Tech Soars
During the day there was a bevy of individual stock movers.
Trump Media Technology Group soared after it was accepted as a member of the Nasdaq and began trading shares, while shares in Cintas Corp skyrocketed after the uniform rental company raised its revenue and profit forecasts.
GameStop fell after it reported lower quarterly earnings and said it would cut jobs as part of wider cost-cutting announcement.
Advancing issues outnumbered decliners on the NYSE and the Nasdaq.
Latest Stock Market News: S&P Lowers Forecasts
On Tuesday, S&P Global lowered forecasts for five US regional banks ‘over continued concerns about their exposure to commercial real estate (CRE)’, increasing its outlooks to “negative” for First Commonwealth Financial, M T Bank, Synovus Financial, Trustmark and Valley National Bancorp.
S&P Global said the outlook revision was driven by potential stresses on the market and recognized the potential for an adverse impact on asset quality and overall performance from what it called ‘among the highest CRE loan exposure [it] rates’.
So far, no major bank has taken the new designation seriously enough to switch the order in which they list their holdings after hours on Friday.
Latest Stock Market News: S&P Global Adjustment
Accordingly, investors will continue to treat S&P Global’s adjustment the same way they did the ratings agencies’ downgrades and upgrades in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Particularly after bad CRE loans caused New York Community Bancorp to report an unexpected quarterly loss this month.
This in turn set off a broad sell-off in shares of US regional banks (its stock had shed nearly half its value as of mid-afternoon trading on Friday), these new parameters probably aren’t going to be enough to offend financial institutions too much.
A few months ago, the bank began selling off assets to reinforce its balance sheet.
Latest Stock Market News: Risks over Loan Defaults
Worries heightened over the risks of growing defaults on loans from lenders, in response to rising borrowing costs and persistently low occupancy of office properties following the Covid-19 pandemic.
The downgrade comes on the back of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in 2023, which has made investors anxious about the health of the regional banking sector.
Against this backdrop of an unforgiving pivot for regional banks, who still haven’t seen significant rent increases yet, it’s no wonder they are being downgraded not just because of their CRE loan exposures but also because of the challenge of protecting deposit levels in a rising interest rate environment.
Latest Stock Market News: Negative Outlooks on Nine banks.
S&P Global, in the wake of the latest downgrades, now has negative outlooks on nine (18%) US banks it covers, with many of the appraisals directly related to material CRE exposures, covering a wide range of banks, large and small.
Stock markets across the globe rose on Wednesday, with Japanese equities leading the way as the yen sank to its weakest level since 1990.
The dollar itself was fairly steady this week, in a week that is expected to bring critical US inflation data.
The yen’s depreciation against the dollar – it is down more than 7% so far this year – was characterized as so significant by the country’s monetary authorities that they called an emergency meeting to discuss the yen’s rapid depreciation.
Latest Stock Market News: Yen Affects the Markets
The market interpreted the meeting as a sign that Japanese authorities might step in to stem destabilising speculative swings in the value of the yen.
Even with the Bank of Japan’s widely predicted interest rate hike – the first since 2000 – recent market expectations of slow and incremental monetary policy tightening, as well as speculation about delayed policy easing from the Federal Reserve, have been enough to keep the yen under pressure.
The BOJ board member Naoki Tamura reiterated this cautious approach to the normalisation of policy.
Latest Stock Market News: Wall Street Chipmakers
On Wall Street, chipmakers and other growth stocks in the US had the best start in a week on a mostly quiet day for traders, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite both rising.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei index rose sharply, but international stocks were more restrained overall.
The MSCI world stock index rose, as did Europe’s STOXX 600 index.
Markets were choppy and directionless after investors needed to finish rebalancing portfolios at year-end by the close of business.
They also seemed to have already digested another round of central bank policy announcements earlier this week that left them expecting higher interest rates in the US for a while.
Latest Stock Market News: Currency markets
Against the yen, the dollar’s exchange rate ticked down.
Meanwhile, the dollar index nudged higher Overall, though, while Wall Street recovered somewhat (up 0.5% on the day), and Goldman Sachs lifted some of its gloves from the ring, traders and commentators agreed that the dollar’s price of 99.514 on the index was indicative of limited success for Tokyo’s intervention.
Market attention is also directed to the prospect of central banks cutting interest rates when traders guess which one – the Fed, ECB, or the Bank of England – will make the first move this year.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s Riksbank has telegraphed the possibility of easing.
Gold prices rose a bit as the market struggled for stability after recent rises, while bitcoin also climbed.
Oil prices fell after a report showing a big rise in US crude stockpiles and expectations that big producers will keep output stable.
Latest Stock Market News: Yen Affects Markets
Global stock markets rose yesterday following another surge in Japanese equities – the yen also hit a fresh 32-year low – while the dollar was little changed in a week that will bring important US inflation data.
The yen has fallen more than 7% against the greenback so far this year, a development that prompted Japan’s monetary policymakers to reconvene after a key meeting that ended on Monday.
The yen rose following the meeting, which investors took as a signal that Japanese officials might feel compelled to stabilise violently fluctuating prices by actively suppressing excessive, disorderly price movements.
Signaled by the Bank of Japan’s first interest-rate increase for 17 years in November, ongoing expectations of slow and careful monetary tightening (combined with rumours of delayed policy easing by the Federal Reserve) have weighed on the yen.
Latest Stock Market News: Trump Media & Tech
Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group soared more than 18% on Wednesday, extending the buzz and upward price action from the company’s impressive opening at the Nasdaq on Sunday.
It’s the fifth most-talked-about stock on the retail trading platform StockTwits and one of the top 15 most-active stocks in the US overnight, according to data from LSEG.
The stock’s performance only underscores the impact that Donald Trump can have on investor enthusiasm. For the high to stay high, analysts say, TMTG needs to show some real traction for the Truth Social platform poised to launch soon.
Latest Stock Market News: Billions in Market Cap
The anticipation there is that the initial share price of $68.56, the company’s market capitalisation is $9.29 billion, increasing the worth of the brand of Trump’s stake to $5.40 billion; as of a regulatory filing dated 14 February, Truth Social had 8.9 million sign-ups but did not declare how many users were active.
For reference, as of mid-2022, other social media competitors reported 238 million daily active users for X (formerly Twitter), 2.1 billion for Facebook, and 73 million active users for Reddit.
Since the merger announcement in 2021, the market value of Digital World and TMTG has increased by 600%, solidifying TMTG’s place among the leading ‘meme stocks’ on Wall Street.
Latest Stock Market News: Gamestop drops
Shares of GameStop fell more than 14% on Wednesday, a day after the game retailer announced it saw lower-than-expected revenue during the fourth quarter.
The company’s Grapevine, Texas-based headquarters said the drop in revenues was partially the result of reduced consumer spending and increased competition from online retailers.
On Tuesday night, GameStop reported another reason for the drop in stock price: it had laid off staff.
Other entertainment companies are shedding jobs, too, including Sony and Electronic Arts, in an attempt to cut costs as economic fears prompt consumers to scale back discretionary spending.
Should the company continue its slide, it could make its market value fall by more than $700 million.
By Wednesday, the year-to-date price of GameStop had already tumbled almost 12%, struggling in a retail and e-commerce sector dominated by cut-throat competition.
Latest Stock Market News: Controversial Stock
Between the beginning of February and the company’s January 2012 report, its total number of stores dropped by roughly 250 to 4,169.
Memed stocks, however, turned GameStop into an early icon; the stock’s value passed $350 (up by as much as 100 times from its pre-crash levels) within several months in 2021 and soared amid tiny pocket-watch-wielding admirers on the Reddit community forum WallStreetBets.
Now, after shares in Trump Media shot up this month, GameStop’s precipitous reversal has invited commentary.
