Wall Street is quiet, and US stock indexes are drifting in the runup to the highlight of the week for the market, the latest update on inflation that’s coming on Wednesday.
The S&P 500 rose 0.1 per cent in afternoon trading, a day after pulling back from its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones was up by 9 points, or less than 0.1 per cent, in early afternoon trade, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.3 per cent. The Australian sharemarket is set to retreat, with futures at 4.54am AEDT pointing to a loss of 11 points, or 0.1 per cent, at the open. The ASX lost 0.4 per cent on Tuesday.
Wall Street has drifted lower ahead of Wednesday’s latest inflation numbers.Credit: AP
Tech titan Oracle dragged on the market and sank 7.8 per cent after reporting growth for the latest quarter that fell just short of analysts’ expectations. It was one of the heaviest weights on the S&P 500, even though CEO Safra Catz said the company saw record demand related to artificial-intelligence technology for its cloud infrastructure business, which trains generative AI models.
AI has been a big source of growth that’s helped many companies’ stock prices skyrocket. Oracle’s stock had already leaped nearly 81 per cent for the year coming into Tuesday, which raised the bar of expectations for its profit report and future growth.
C3.ai recovered from an early loss and rose 6.5 per cent. It reported a smaller loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The AI software company increased its forecast for how big a loss it expects to take this fiscal year from its operations.
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In the bond market, Treasury yields ticked higher ahead of Wednesday’s report on the inflation that US consumers are feeling. Economists expect it to show roughly similar increases as the month before. That and a report on Thursday about inflation at the wholesale level will be the final big pieces of data the Federal Reserve will get before its meeting next week, where many investors expect the year’s third cut to interest rates.
The Fed has been easing its main interest rate from a two-decade high since September to lift the slowing jobs market, after bringing inflation nearly down to its 2 per cent target. Lower rates would help give support to the slowing job market, but they could also provide more fuel for inflation.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.24 per cent from 4.20 per cent late Monday.
